A council chief says he is keen to see an “ugly” multi-storey car park removed to make way for a more attractive entrance to Lichfield city centre.
The Birmingham Road facility has been earmarked for redevelopment as part of a mixed use scheme on land previously earmarked for Friarsgate.
An indicative drawing suggests a cinema could be built on the site alongside the empty Debenhams unit along with food and drink outlets and offices.
Cllr Doug Pullen, leader of Lichfield District Council, said:
“The current multi-storey car park is ugly and there are better uses for the space.
“We want to make the city centre attractive when people first arrive.”
Cllr Doug Pullen, Lichfield District Council
The redevelopment of the area would not necessarily see a like-for-like replacement of the lost spaces as part of the scheme.
Work on a city centre masterplan has previously suggested that there are more than enough spaces across the central area of Lichfield, but that drivers tend to focus on a limited number of locations.
Speaking last year, Cllr Pullen said there were solutions – including the use of tiered parking rates – that could be introduced to make better use of alternative facilities.
“We absolutely have an over-provision of car parking spaces within the city – a number of our car parks sit half-empty throughout the day and yet all of us will know that Bird Street car park can often involve periods of circling to find a space.
“It’s my view that we should improve our signage to make sure people know and understand where the car parks are and that they can have real time data about how many spaces are available within each car park as they enter the city.”
Cllr Doug Pullen, Lichfield District Council
The Birmingham Road multi-storey has had a chequered past, having been upgraded to include wider bays in 2009, only to shut shortly afterwards for urgent repairs amid fears it could collapse – a closure that ended up lasting 11 months.
The facility was resurfaced again in 2015 as part of remedial work, but the failure of the Friarsgate redevelopment to come to fruition again left question marks over the future of the car park.
A council report in 2019 revealed that the failure of the long-awaited city centre redevelopment project was likely to mean the cost of extending the life of the multi-storey would stretch to a further £300,000.
And just last year, the upper levels of the car park were closed once more to allow further maintenance and repair work to take place.
A debate over whether to proceed with the latest redevelopment plans for the site will take place at a meeting of Lichfield District Council on 22nd February.
