Creating a legacy: Q&A with Helmsley’s Max Reeves

Place Yorkshire met with Max Reeves, director at Helmsley Group and York native, to have a tour of Coney Street and to ask him about one of the most historically significant regeneration projects in Yorkshire right now.

The York-based developer’s masterplan for Coney Street will see the creation of 250,000 sq ft of retail, leisure, commercial, and residential space along the city’s waterfront.

The site consists of 19-33 Coney Street, and 39 Coney Street to 2 Spurriergate. It includes four listed buildings and two buildings of merit, and is in close proximity to a number of other listed buildings and buildings of importance.

Situated in the city’s Central Conservation Area, a riverside walkway will be built alongside new and rejuvenated historic lanes and passageways, reconnecting Coney Street and the River Ouse.

When did Helmsley first have the idea for this project?

We’ve always had the view that, you look at the riverfront and it’s underused – I can’t think of another city such as York that doesn’t use its riverfront. But it was really Covid and changing retail habits that allowed us the ability to come in and do the site assembly and bring it all together.

We engaged with the council from day one, and spent a lot of time with stakeholders and making sure that everyone bought into the vision of what we were doing. It took us a few years to get planning and we’ve done a lot of public engagement, significantly more than we traditionally do on a typical project, because it is such an important one for the city centre.

We tried to bring everyone along with us – you can’t be pushing against a brick wall.

When do you expect the entire project to be completed?

This is a long-term regeneration project and will be delivered on a phase-by-phase basis over the next five to ten years.

What is your ambition for the scheme?

It’s about bringing people down here and getting reconnected with the water. We’ve got all the planning in place now, we got it at the back-end of last year. There are three phases and phase one will start this year and take around 12 months. The next phase we’ll look to start in 2026.

It’s a very exciting project; certainly a legacy one.

Will the retail stay at the same level or will it go further down to the water?

We’re going to keep the level at the same height. In York, if it floods there is a 4.5-5 metre level difference between the low side and high side of the river, so we did quite a lot of work to look at how we could bring people down to the actual water level and there is still an ambition to have some kind of floating element on the waterway. But in reality, it’s very difficult to achieve.

Also, one of the big aims we’ve had and what a lot of the planning focused on was to have fully accessible spaces around Coney Street, so we’ll stay up at this elevated [street] level.

And dare we ask about viability – how has that played out on this project?

It’s tough because it’s an expensive site to build and there aren’t many schemes like this, right in a city centre with so much quality public realm being provided at the developers cost. We don’t have any public funding support unfortunately!

It’s a challenge but the short answer is yes, it is viable. There’s a lot of positive market sentiment around investing in York and the prime nature of York as a destination allows for achieving relatively strong capital values on the upper floors accommodation.

What have been the biggest challenges involved with the scheme?

The planning process for this project was quite extensive due to the listed buildings and buildings of merit within the development. During the planning process, we were thankful for the support we received from key York organisations including the York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce and York BID, as well as overwhelming positive feedback on our plans from the public and current Coney Street businesses.

Do you have any plans in the pipeline for other regeneration projects in Yorkshire? 

Our latest strategy is to focus on better use of the upper floors of buildings across York centre. This approach promotes the revitalisation of upper floors above retail and hospitality units which are currently empty and underused, but present opportunities for residential space in a city that often struggles with planning constraints.

From High Ousegate to King’s Square, we plan to transform currently disused upper floors across York to create much needed city centre accommodation.