Sneak peek into ‘stunning’ Gloucester city centre project The Forum

By Carmelo Garcia – Local Democracy Reporter

Gloucester’s £107m The Forum redevelopment is nearing completion and should be finished early next year.

The mixed-use development is Gloucester City Council’s flagship project and is being brought forward in partnership with Reef Group which is at the heart of the city centre’s King’s Quarter regeneration.

Once complete, it will provide premium office space, retail space, restaurants, a Hotel Indigo and a rooftop bar.

The development is part of the wider £200m regeneration of the city centre.

The Forum will offer a sustainably built, mixed use development with 135,000 sq ft of Grade A office space: providing flexibility for companies to adapt their work environment as teams grow.

The upscale brand hotel Hotel Indigo will open as a 131-bedroom boutique hotel, including a restaurant, conferencing facilities and rooftop cocktail bar.

And the Q-Park 398-space car park will have 39 electric vehicle charging points.

It is situated next to Gloucester transport hub, including the £6.4m new bus station and the train station, as well as providing bicycle parking on-site and offers stunning views of the city centre, cathedral and surrounding countryside.

More than 70 per cent of the available floor space is already taken although work is not yet complete.

Peter Langly-Smith, Reef Group Managing Director, said: “We’ve partially completed part of it,” he said. “It’s only a month or so away from completing some of the offices.

“The hotel and car park will follow early in the new year.People will be working at desks in the Forum in two months’ time.

“To be honest, building in the last three years has had its challenges just because of the way the economy and inflation has hit.

“We’ve been working very collaboratively with Kier as contractors and with the council as partners. We are just excited to get it finished. It’s been a privilege to be working on this project.”

“The fact that the Forum has been built was a sort of a precursor to the council committing to regenerate and spend money in Public Realm and King Square.

“The fact that the Forum was committed to gave confidence to the university to say we want to relocate to the city centre in the form of Debenhams.

“ So all of these things in isolation, you know, almost the sum of the parts is greater than them in isolation.

“They’ve all had an impact and played their part in trying to sort of create this city centre environment to be more vibrant than it was.

“And if you look at what this was, this has completely changed, not just the arrival, but the offer for everyone in Gloucester, whether you live here or you work.”

Sam Potter, design director at Reef, said the whole development was designed in house up until planning stage and then they partnered Whittam Cox Architects.

He said the basic principle for everything in the building is to minimise energy consumption.

The solar panels on the roof will provide enough electricity to power all the lights in The Forum, he said.

“So what you’ll see is that throughout there’s very there’s going to be very limited finishes because there’s a lot of embodied carbon in the finishes.

“We’ve got photovoltaics on every roof and they provide enough for all the lighting in the development and all the small power. So cleaner sockets and all the lighting is provided for by the energy from the roof.

“We can run the building on about 60% of the traditional office in terms of air conditioning. All these you see around they open up.

“And it means that you can turn off floor by floor, the air conditioning so you can have a naturally ventilated office space.

“And then we’ve selected providers which are only renewable energy. So we can have what’s called net zero carbon in operation.”

He said basic passive design in the building means they can keep the building cool in the summer.

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