Sponsored by
A vision of luxury for city
PLANS have been unveiled for a four-star hotel to be built next to the Peace Gardens in the centre of Sheffield.
The 18m hotel will be built by the Scottish company Macdonald’s Hotels which has pledged to create a landmark building on the high profile site, which is sandwiched between the Grade l listed Town Hall and the award winning Millennium Galleries.
The development will create about 130 jobs and be the first four-star hotel in the city with 150 luxury bedrooms and a tariff of about 120 per night. Bob Kerslake, chief executive at Sheffield City Council, said the hotel would be a significant milestone in the Heart of the City, the ongoing project to revitalise the city centre.
He said yesterday: “This is a major step forward for the Heart of the City and a major step forward in the regeneration of Sheffield City Centre.
“It has been clear for some time that Sheffield needed a high-quality, four-star hotel and it was always part of the plan to secure a hotel operator for this site.
“There will be 150 bedrooms as well as conferencing and banqueting facilities for 500 which will make this hotel a destination in its
own right. It will be of a higher standard and quality than what we have in the rest of the city and it will be right in the centre of the city.”
Macdonald’s started life with two hotels in Aberdeenshire in 1990. It now has 100 and is the eighth largest hotel group in the UK.
It owns a number of “heritage” hotels in historic buildings and in 2000 won Scottish Hotel of the Year with one of its most recent developments, at Holyrood, near the home of the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh.
Macdonald’s chairman Frank O’Callaghan said the architectural sensitivity of the Sheffield site would be respected with a high quality development.
The prime site is bordered by the historic Town Hall, the Peace Gardens, the Millennium Gallery and Winter Gardens, which are still under construction. “We are confident that it will be one of Yorkshire’s premier hotels,” he said.
The company had previously been involved in a bid to build a hotel near Sheffield University but abandoned the project after negotiations over parking failed.
The new site was home to Sheffield’s notorious “egg-box” town hall extension and the six-month project to demolish it and clear the land is nearly completed. A planning application for the hotel will be submitted within the next few months and it is hoped that building work will begin before the end of the year, with the hotel throwing open its doors 18 months later.
Alison Nimmo, the chief executive of Sheffield One, the Urban Regeneration Company driving the city’s transformation, said she was convinced the hotel would be a huge asset.
“The resounding success of the Heart of the City project so far made it really important to select the right hotel operator and we could not have chosen better than Macdonald Hotels,” she said.
lyn.barton@ypn.co.uk
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Sheffield
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
