By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter
Nottingham’s former Central Library building will be going back up for sale after a developer pulled out and funding for its refurbishment was spent elsewhere.
In September 2022 Nottingham City Council said it was ready to appoint architects to transform the Angel Row site into offices, exhibition and gallery space, studios and units for the creative industries.
The library permanently closed in 2020, and the city was left without a central facility until the new one opened on the Broadmarsh site at the end of last year.
Funding, to the tune of £3.9m, had been granted by the Government for the Angel Row project as part of its Future High Streets Fund.
A developer had been looking to purchase the site, however it failed to “come through with the money” and the project was deemed undeliverable.
Rather than giving the money back, the Labour-run authority managed to repurpose the funds for a new NHS testing centre in the middle of the Broadmarsh site.
During an Executive Board meeting on Tuesday, May 21, the authority’s new leader, Cllr Neghat Khan (Lab), said unfortunately the scheme could not go ahead due to economic conditions.
“In this context the council has sought an agreement with [the department] to reallocate the Angel Row Future High Streets Fund grant to an alternative project at Broadmarsh, specifically the Community Diagnostics Centre,” she said.
The state-of-the-art medical facility, offering MRI, CT, X-rays and ultrasound scans, will be built in the centre of Nottingham, subject to planning approval.
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) will be staffing the new Community Diagnostic Centre, which aims to help reduce waiting lists, diagnose conditions earlier and free up space in hospitals.
It will be located on the site of the half-demolished Broadmarsh shopping centre, where a park called the ‘Green Heart’ is currently being build as part of plans to transform the area.
Speaking after the meeting about the future of the Angel Row building, Cllr Khan told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “We are going to look at putting [Angel Row] back on the market and see who comes up.
“But obviously this item that has come to Executive Board clearly shows we could have returned the money, but the staff we have are great because they have looked at, rather than returning the money, how can we repurpose it?
“That will actually help other developers look at that area and actually think there is a lot happening there and we want to invest in that part of the city.”
Paul Seddon, the council’s director of planning, said that, as a result of the reallocated money, the diagnostics centre will be “an even better scheme that that has been in the media” already.
