Developer in talks with potential occupiers in new Peterborough North Westgate development plan

Peter Breach, chairman of Hawksworth Securities, which has been trying to regenerate the 10-acre site for 23 years, has revealed that he is in negotiations with two potential occupiers for a new development.

He said: “I am currently in talks with two serious and significant occupiers for different parts of the site.

"We are working hard on this development and searching for other occupiers

"Our architect is putting together the first stage of new proposals.

“We are still spending money on this project.”

Mr Breach, who is the largest single landowner in North Westgate, said the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the retail and hospitality sectors had meant a rethink about the type of facilities that should make up the development.

He would not say when a new planning application might be submitted to the council.

Earlier proposals have included a hotel plus a range of accommodation, commercial units and a cinema.

But Mr Breach did say that with hindsight he should have pushed on with a cinema-led plan for the site that were approved by Peterborough City Council in 2018.

At the time he dropped the venture because the Queensgate Shopping Centre, which is next to North Westgate, had also secured approval for its cinema.

Mr Breach said: “It would have been the best thing for the city and would have brought more economic life to the city. But I didn’t think two cinemas so close to each other were viable.”

Those other North Westgate applications:

Mr Breach first submitted plans for North Westgate in 2003.

He dropped a 2018 approval for plans, which had been submitted three years earlier, that included a cinema after the neighbouring Queensgate Shopping Centre also gained permission for a cinema.

That application had included a hotel and commercial and residential development.

But that permission elapsed a couple of years later after the company failed to submit details about so-called ‘reserved matters’.

In the same year, the council published its own regeneration masterplan for the site and set a timescale of five years to get development under way.

The council plan for North Westgate:

In March 2024, Peterborough City Council released a video in which Nick Carter, who was then the council’s growth and regeneration director, said North Westgate had ‘risen up in our priority list for a development that we need to get away.’

He stated: “So we’re looking at ways of assembling this site ourselves, maybe looking at using the council’s own powers of intervention to ensure this development comes forward in the next 24 months.”

That two year deadline runs out next month.