Attracting city centre investment in a difficult economic climate: A new approach to the regeneration of Wolverhampton city centre

Wolverhampton is the 13th biggest city in the UK and is situated in the West Midlands of England. When Wolverhampton’s £300m Summer Row retail development failed to find a new financial backer, the city council declared the project defunct in January of 2011 after nearly a decade of tireless efforts to replace an older mixed-use area in the declining Snow Hill quarter of the city, with a 600,000 square feet shopping and leisure complex anchored by Debenhams and Marks and Spencer. The chill winds of the credit crunch following the international banking crisis of 2009 put paid to any early prospect of securing alternative funding for a flagship development on which so much had been staked. Wolverhampton is now fighting back, however, with an ambitious but deliverable new approach to its city centre and acting as a ‘regeneration enabler’. The author describes how the council dealt with the immediate aftermath of a failed scheme, shifted gear and employed time-honoured principles of partnership working combined with a renewed respect for the commercial imperative to create an ambitious but achievable vision for the city centre.