Make and Lace Market Team Up For Nottingham

The city of Nottingham in the East Midlands could soon be joining the ranks of British cities displaying some of the most futuristic designs around if new plans by Make are approved.Designed in a collaboration between Lace Market and the big-wig of Make, Ken Shuttleworth, the £100 million scheme will see three highly angular blocks on a strategic plot in the Southside Regeneration Zone at the Meadows Gateway site.The site had been put up by the local council to a competition inviting bids from all interested. Lace Market came up with a mixed use scheme that can contain offices, residential and retail plus a new hotel and public square. Part of the development involves realigning the NET Phase 2 tram network to cut through the area utilising the public square as a transport hub. The project has also been planned to provide views at ground level straight through it from one end to the other, of the famous Nottingham Castle.The three separate blocks are massed to fit in with the Lower Meadows residential area, sloping down towards them from their 14 floor peak. They will be clad in anodised aluminium of various colours above the ground retail units and their floor to ceiling glazing. The patterning will be coordinated to move along entire street-fronts rather than limited to single buildings so the red from the tallest building will gradually give way to green or blue.Lace Market are one of the leading local developers in Nottingham and have a good record on building their proposed projects, they have the Litmus development, also in Nottingham, already under construction and an 80 metre tall residential tower proposed at Brook Street. This project however puts them in a completely new league in terms of both design quality and sheer importance, something that John Morris, Lace Market Properties Director of Architecture, has a little optimistically called "an iconic statement about Nottingham similarly to the way The Bull Ring is with Birmingham and the Gherkin is in London."