Every little helps Eastside

Tesco faces a battle on two fronts in its bid to become the first bricks and mortar to rise up out of the ground on Nottingham’s Eastside.
One is from people who view Britain’s biggest supermarket group as a rapacious giant intent on sweeping all before it.
The other is from a city council unhappy that, after six years of waiting, a prime slice of big city commercial real estate has yielded nothing more than plans for a shop.
After all, they’ve been sitting and hoping for something special in the wake of computer-generated artist’s impressions showing a remodelled canal basin surrounded by gleaming edifices of offices, apartments and restaurants.
A Tesco didn’t figure anywhere in the talk about what a £700m, 35-acre new commercial quarter might achieve for Nottingham.
So there was a palpable sense of disappointment among some of the people I spoke to about the plan for a giant supermarket on the derelict site behind BioCity and next to Manvers Street.
Tesco has tacitly admitted that one of its off-the-shelf hypermarket designs simply won’t do.
Indeed, it will have to pull something special out of the bag if it is to avoid a response along the lines of: ‘Is that it?’
There’s been a lot of that in Nottingham lately. The truth is that the city nodded through some miserably unambitious tat during the boom years, and a broiling tension between senior councillors and the planning department has bubbled over more than once in recent months.
The arrival of a new, but only interim, planning chief – an outsider unfazed by pushy developers - has brought a sharp focus to a painful debate about whether the city played a poor hand in the good times.
It drew up ambitious masterplans for the large-scale redevelopment of three key parts of the city, Eastside,Southside and Waterside.
What’s happened in the 10 years these plans have been knocking around? For one thing, the UK has been through one of its longest ever periods of economic growth. For another, much of that growth came from investment-driven property development.
What did this magnificent boom yield in Eastside, Southside and Waterside?
Nothing. Not one development.
You don’t need to be a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute to realise that this raises basic questions. Were the plans too ambitious? And were they pursued properly?
There is a third alternative: they were too rigid. Eastside was portrayed as a whole new commercial quarter of the city led by office developments, apartments and the restaurants and retail facilities they would support.
The only serious whisper about a large-scale office development on Eastside related to a new complex for Nottingham City Council that might bring its scattered operations under one, unifying roof.
This had some sense, putting it alongside another major public body (the East Midlands Development Agency) and opening up the possibility of a major public sector office quarter.
Unfortunately, this boom-time dream lost impetus with the departure of Gordon Mitchell, the city council chief executive who had been in favour of the scheme. The council has since – probably quite rightly – gone for the significantly cheaper option of moving into the Loxley House complex vacated by Capital One.
As well all know, the property-led boom has drowned itself in a sea of debt.
The fact that it’s Tesco that now wants to build a store on part of the Eastside site is neither here nor there.
Indeed, there’s a risk that ritual Tesco-bashing (which ignores the robust business practices of other major retailers) will muddy the waters.
The question is whether Nottingham City Council wants to see any supermarket on the site with all that a large-scale retail development always brings with it.
Is that by definition a bad thing? Or is it a simple dose of commercial reality?