By Ryan Sands
RENEWAL of planning permission for the construction of a 41-bedroom hotel on Newcastle’s Central Promenade is being sought.
In June 2019, the four-storey development on the town’s former Post Office site was given the go-ahead by council, and, in recent weeks, the New York-based applicant, Arnau LLC, submitted a fresh application seeking to extend the timeframe of this.
A condition attached to the original approval – for a hotel with its own rooftop restaurant, ground floor café and basement car parking – stated that ‘the development hereby permitted shall be begun before the expiration of five years from the date of this permission’.
The local authority’s 2019 planning report noted that the development’s ground floor would include a reception and lobby area and associated office, bar/restaurant, kitchen area and 11 bedrooms, whilst the first and second floors would have 17 and 13 bedrooms respectively.
A ‘fine dining restaurant and associated kitchen area with external terrace’ would be located on the upper fourth floor.
It also highlighted that permission for an apartment development and retail units had previously been granted for the site, and that the hotel – which it described as ‘a significant building in terms of size, scale and massing’ – had been designed with a similar footprint.
The document stated that the proposal had a job creation potential of 35 full-time jobs and 10 part-time jobs.
It recognised that constructing a hotel on the site would involve the loss of retail at a town centre location, though added that ‘it is clear that there is a need to respond to the evolving nature of our town centres with a degree of flexibility’.
‘It is considered that a hotel development on this site will inject a level of vibrancy to the town centre, which is of benefit to both the vitality and viability of the town centre and to the tourist offer in the town,’ the report concluded.
As part of the application process, a specialist tourism consultant undertook a study on behalf of the developer, and a report on this predicted an annual turnover of £2.1m, along with secondary economic benefits, such as increasing visitor spend in the local area.
It also stated that ‘no new hotel bedrooms have been approved in Newcastle in the last 10 years’, and that ‘an undersupply in accommodation for three to four months of the year results in tourism trade lost to Belfast and the north coast’.
