IN Brief:
- Portsmouth City Council has selected ECF as preferred partner for the 13.25-hectare City Centre North regeneration.
- The brownfield area could accommodate up to 2,300 homes alongside workspace, leisure uses, and more than 240,000 sq ft of public space.
- ECF and the council will test development options and viability before deciding whether to proceed to a formal Development Agreement.
ECF has been selected by Portsmouth City Council as preferred partner for City Centre North, moving the 13.25-hectare brownfield regeneration area into a new phase of masterplanning and viability work.
The city-centre site has capacity for up to 2,300 homes across a mix of tenures. Current ambitions also include workspace, leisure uses, and more than 240,000 sq ft of public space, including a substantial urban park and new connections between the development area, surrounding neighbourhoods, and the wider city centre.
The appointment does not yet constitute a final development agreement or construction commitment. ECF and the council plan to enter a Development and Masterplanning Services Agreement, allowing the partnership to examine development options and test viability before deciding whether to progress to a formal Development Agreement.
That work will establish how much of the headline development capacity can be converted into deliverable phases. Housing density, commercial uses, public realm, access, utilities, land assembly, remediation, infrastructure, and development economics will need to be coordinated before individual plots can move towards procurement and construction.
ECF combines Homes England’s National Housing Bank, L&G, and Muse in a long-term regeneration partnership. Its current portfolio includes schemes in Canning Town, Stockport, Bradford, Wolverhampton, Northampton, and Stevenage, while the partnership has a strategic target to deliver 17,000 homes and more than 1m sq ft of commercial space by 2036.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of ECF, said: “We’re looking forward to working with Portsmouth City Council over the coming months to explore the site in detail, test what’s deliverable here, and build the case for how we might take this forward together.”
Early work is likely to concentrate on masterplanning, surveys, engineering, transport, utilities, environmental assessment, viability, and enabling strategy. A scheme of this size could later generate separate packages across demolition, remediation, roads, drainage, public realm, residential construction, commercial space, landscaping, and building services, but those opportunities depend on the phasing and infrastructure strategy now being developed.
The city-centre location creates a different delivery environment from an edge-of-town housing site. Construction traffic, temporary routes, neighbouring businesses, pedestrian access, utility diversions, and the sequencing of new public space will have to be managed while the surrounding urban area remains operational.
Those constraints will influence which plots can be brought forward first. Early infrastructure may need to support several later development phases, while temporary arrangements must avoid restricting access to surrounding businesses or making subsequent plots harder to build.
ECF’s wider programme includes Willohaus in Salford, a 100-home affordable Passivhaus scheme within the Crescent Salford masterplan. City Centre North is substantially larger, but the completed scheme illustrates the partnership’s use of long-term regeneration structures to combine public-sector objectives, housing delivery, and defined technical standards.
Infrastructure funding will be one of the more difficult questions during the Portsmouth viability work. Streets, public space, utility capacity, remediation, and community infrastructure can require substantial expenditure before later development values are realised, so the partnership will need to decide which elements must be delivered early and how those costs are distributed across the programme.
That sequencing also affects procurement strategy. Early surveys and enabling packages may need to precede the main development phases by a considerable margin, while later residential and commercial plots could require different contracting routes depending on land ownership, funding, tenure, and the timing of infrastructure completion.
For the council, the masterplanning stage will also need to define how public space is delivered alongside revenue-generating development rather than postponed until the final phases. The timing of streets, landscaping, and connections can influence the attractiveness and value of later plots, but bringing those elements forward too early can increase financing pressure before receipts are available.
Portsmouth City Council has acknowledged that City Centre North has taken longer to progress than originally hoped. Councillor Steve Pitt, leader of Portsmouth City Council, said the partnership would allow the authority to test options, build an evidence base, and explore the best route for bringing the plans forward.
The coming phase will determine whether the site’s 2,300-home capacity can be translated into a viable sequence of investable plots. A Development Agreement would provide the next formal delivery step; until then, masterplanning and viability work will decide the scale, timing, and infrastructure requirements of the first phases.
