Westmorland floats £16m Barrow contract

The council is ramping up its efforts to realise a long-held ambition of delivering hundreds of homes at the Marina Village regeneration site.

Westmorland and Furness Council is seeking a contractor to carry out remediation work at the majority council-owned site, paving the way for around 800 homes.

The authority is offering up a £16m contract to prepare the 60-acre site for development.

Delivering the housing element of Barrow’s waterfront regeneration will “deliver wider benefits in terms of investor confidence to the rest of the town”, according to tender documents.

Westmorland’s cabinet met in January to accept £25m of brownfield funding from Homes England to remediate the Marina Village site, located off Cavendish Dock Road.

The first phase of enabling work to prepare the site for redevelopment completed in November and was paid for with £5.5m from the government’s Get Building Fund.

The additional brownfield funding will enable the completion of infrastructure work across the entire council-owned site, the package of work for which a contractor is sought.

The Barrow Borough Local Plan identifies this site as a strategic housing allocation which has an indicative yield of 650 homes. It accounts for a little over one-third of the total allocated housing to 2031 within the local plan and is one of the largest housing sites within the new Westmorland and Furness Authority.

The redevelopment of the Marina Village site has been a long-held ambition of the council. In 2008, Carlisle-based Story Group was selected to develop the £120m scheme by West Lakes Renaissance, the urban regeneration company for Furness and West Cumbria, together with Barrow Council.

However, the project stalled due to the financial crash.