Chesterfield , the largest town in Derbyshire, is to receive over 1,200 new homes in a £350m mixed-use regeneration project planned for the town.

Urbo Regeneration working in partnership with Chesterfield Borough Council will be developing a 40 acre site which will also encompass 400,000 sq ft of commercial floor space. The 1,200 homes are currently planned to be split between 400 houses and 800 apartments. The project has been planned over an approximately 10 year period with a planning application to be submitted in the autumn. The project plans to ‘sidestep’ the current problems in the apartment market by focusing initially on the building of low density houses and then moving on to the apartments. Urbo has described Chesterfield as not suffering from the same oversupply of residential apartments which currently affect some other northern towns and cities.

The site, which is 10 minutes outside of the town centre, will be focused around the Chesterfield Canal. It is planned to create a Canal Head which will be a basin for canal boats, this will be surrounded by high quality retail space. There are also plans for an island community between the canal and the river with high end housing.

Andrew Dainty, director of Urbo Regeneration, told PIN: “Our Council partners have said that Chesterfield Waterside is the most important regeneration project the Town has seen in forty years, so Urbos job as their developer is to make sure the scheme, when delivered, is of the highest possible quality. The local community has similar expectations having given an almost unprecedented 99% support from our public consultation work earlier this year. Recent market pressures on apartment delivery arent a great problem for such a long-term project.”