Hotel and homes passed at Liverpool planning meeting
Liverpool City Council has approved the conversion of an office in Castle Street into a budget hotel, and the £20m redevelopment of the derelict Kensington Market into 280 homes.
47 Castle Street was bought from Merseyside Estates earlier this year by easyHotel, the hotel chain founded by easyJet tycoon Stelio Haji-Ioannou.
The 1970s building has 6,600 sq ft of offices over four floors and Salt House Bacaro restaurant on the ground floor.
The £3m conversion designed by Axiom Architects will deliver 77 en-suite bedrooms on the upper floors, while the restaurant will remain operational underneath.
The hotel is due to open in 2016.
At the same meeting the council approved a £20m student accommodation-led scheme, at the former Kensington Market site on Prescot Road.
The derelict site is being developed by PHD1 Construction and Ascot Property Group, advised by BLOK Architecture.
The scheme will see a six-storey block, made up of 203 bedrooms and two ground floor retail units, a four-storey building with 48 studio flats, a two-story building with four studios, and 27 townhouses with between two and four bedrooms in a terrace. The current property on the site will be demolished.
An earlier scheme for Kensington Market designed by Falconer Chester Hall on behalf of owner AW Developments was approved in 2010, which would have seen a 50,000 sq ft supermarket and more than 50 homes built on the site. However AW went into administration in 2012 without starting the scheme.
