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Colchester
Ultra Ready for Business
New Sport & Leisure
Gateway to Colchester
Colchester has ambitious plans to create a lively
and attractive sports and leisure destination
which will act as a Northern Gateway into the
town. Building on a number of successful existing
projects, this will involve the development of new
facilities which will serve a rapidly-growing local
population within Colchester itself and attract
visitors from a much wider area across the region.
The aim of the project is to stand out from other locations, as
North Colchester Programme Manager, Patrick O’Sullivan,
explains, “We want to include a significant design element in
the development. We don’t want someone to visit and think it
looks just like somewhere else”.
Other ambitions include supporting the efforts being made
to improve the town centre, by offering a different array of
activities and by making it easy for visitors to travel there from
Northern Gateway. There is also a strong focus on sustainability.
The project aims to create around 3,500 jobs on around 101ha
(250 acres).
Some of the existing attractions in Northern Gateway are
well-established, including the Weston Homes Community
Stadium, completed in 2008. As well as being home to
Colchester United Football Club this is an important venue
for conferences, exhibitions and gigs by big names such as
Elton John and Lionel Richie.
The turnover from non-football activities at the stadium is now
approaching £2m a year and the system of Community Yield
units – where all activities are assessed as to their benefit to
the community – rose 11% during last year.
The sport and leisure element of Northern Gateway has been
boosted by the completion of a new David Lloyd Leisure club,
which opened in 2016. Nearby there are plans for a
new sports centre including a ‘Cyclogym’, badminton
courts and a high quality café. Outdoors there will
be rugby, archery, dog training, two new 3G artificial
pitches, a cycling race track and a BMX course. In addition,
there will informal walking, cycling and horse-riding
routes in landscaped parkland.
Access to the area has already been improved with the
building of Junction 28 onto the A12 in 2010. Roads into the
town centre have also been created and upgraded as part of
the Park and Ride facility that opened in 2015 just north of
the new junction.
Colchester Borough Council will be heavily involved with a
series of development partners to realise the potential of the
area, which is on Council-owned land. For example, the Council
has chosen Turnstone Estates as its development partner for
a multi-million pound leisure complex on an 18-acre (7.3ha)
site close to the Weston Homes Community Stadium.
This will include a 12-screen regional destination multiplex
cinema to be operated by Cineworld, 13 restaurant units, an
80-bed hotel, indoor active leisure units, car parking for 750
vehicles and a high-quality landscaped piazza. The development
is expected to open in 2018.
There is also employment space in Northern Gateway at the
250,000 sq ft Colchester Business Park, which is home to a
number of office occupiers. Further office development is also
possible for major occupiers, something that will be helped
by Colchester’s Ultrafast Broadband (UFBB) project, which is
giving Colchester some of the fastest upload and download
Broadband speeds in the country and the Council is intending
to roll this out to Northern Gateway in future.
In addition, there will be a residential element including
1,500 homes on the site of the former Severalls Hospital and,
across the north of the town as a whole, 6,200 homes could
be built.