Five years on, Peel’s Port Salford wins approval
Peel Holdings' application for Port Salford has been approved unanimously by Salford Council after an epic struggle to get through planning.
Port Salford will become a 1.5m sq ft distribution park served by rail, road and short sea shipping. The five years spent sitting in the planning queue saw the local authority planning members make repeated requests for more information from Peel, particularly on highways concerns which were a hot political issue locally.
The port will be assembled on a 200-acre site including 40 acres of container yard and, Peel said, will double the capacity of existing multi-modal terminals in Greater Manchester.
Mike Butterworth, property director at Peel said, "We are of course thrilled that the plans for Port Salford have been approved.
"Once completed, the scheme will be able to provide container ship berths, accommodate up to 16 freight trains every day and create more than 2,000 jobs."
The scheme is part of Ocean Gateway, the name given to Peel's proposed £50bn investment strategy for the North West region.
The Port Salford site is located at Barton alongside the Peel-owned Manchester Ship Canal and will offer container ship berths, the highest capacity intermodal rail terminal in Britain and large rail linked buildings to cater for the regional distribution of rail borne domestic and international cargo.
Port Salford will have the capacity to double the number of container trains that currently serve the two terminals on Trafford Park and to handle two container ships simultaneously and also to handle over 200,000 pallets of cargo at any one time in the rail linked distribution buildings. It will be the only inland water served distribution park in the UK.
Peel were advised by Indigo Planning, TTHC and the MDS Group.
Peel Land & Property has a UK property investment and land portfolio consisting of 9m sq ft of investment property and 27,000 acres of land. Peel also has overseas investments in Bermuda, The Bahamas and Spain.
