Inside Sheffield's new Radisson Blu hotel as £470m city centre regeneration scheme progresses

Yorkshire Post

A new Radisson Blu hotel has officially opened its doors as one of the final parts of Sheffield’s pioneering £470m Heart of the City regeneration project.    The new hotel welcomed its first guests on Monday but was formally opened on Tuesday morning by Lord Mayor Jayne Dunn in front of invited media.  It is a key plank in the city council-led Heart of the City scheme, which has been gradually transforming the town centre with new office space, homes, restaurants, shops, Europe's largest purpose-built food hall and a public park.  The council has been working with strategic development partner Queensberry to deliver the regeneration scheme after a previous retail-led proposal called Sevenstone and involving developer Hammerson was scrapped in 2013 in the wake of the global financial crisis after years of problems.  Sean McClean, director of regeneration and development for Sheffield City Council, told The Yorkshire Post: “Heart of the City is a £470m scheme the council has brought forward and the Radisson hotel is a significant part of that.  "It is about providing what will be the premium hotel in the city centre and something there is a shortage for.   "When the council went out to market, we had significant interest from a range of operators and we are really pleased to be working with Radisson to bring it forward. I’ve got to know the Radisson team and I'm sure they are going to make a phenomenal success of it and it will be a fantastic addition to the city centre offer.  "There are not a great deal of hotels of this quality in the city centre. It is giving people somewhere different to come and eat with a fantastic balcony and sights over the city. The hope is it will become one of the places to be in terms of people having a special night out or a celebration meal in the city centre.  "It builds on everything else we have done. It is about driving footfall and giving people a reason to come back into the city centre. The numbers of people we have seen come into the Cambridge Street Collective food hall have been phenomenal.  "This is the first of a new type of city centre generation as we move away from being retail-dominated.”

Transcript

00:001, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

00:13Hi, so we're here on the rooftop of the Radisson Hotel, the new Radisson Hotel that's opening

00:32Sheffield as part of the city. Sean, can you tell me what this opening means for Sheffield

00:38and for the Heart of the City scheme? Yes, certainly. So, the hotel is one of the last

00:43projects to complete in Heart of the City, so we're moving towards the end of construction

00:47now in terms of that. The hotel offers a new, high-end, premium quality hotel that we hope

00:53will be up there with the best of the offer in the city centre, so it offers great places

00:58for people to come and stay when they're visiting Sheffield. It also builds on some of the other

01:02fantastic facilities within Heart of the City, Cambridge Street Collective, Hounds Park,

01:07some of the new retailers and the offices and the residential, so it's about providing

01:11that wide range of new facilities that the Heart of the City scheme has aimed to deliver

01:15for the city centre. What's your message to people from Sheffield and from further afield

01:20who might have avoided Sheffield city centre for the last few years? I think come in and

01:24have a look. I think there's nothing better than coming in and seeing the changes that

01:28have been made. Heart of the City has been four or five years in terms of various phases

01:32of construction. This month, July, sees the end of construction when Lear's Yard finishes,

01:38so all of the hoardings have come down, all of the construction sites have finished. See

01:42some of the fantastic public realm that links it all together. So yeah, come and have a

01:46look for yourself and see what you think.

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