December 1 2007

The Dawn Group and Page /Park have won the competition to develop the Duke Street/Bellgrove Street site in Glasgow’s east end. Dawn agreed to pay £30million for the site 5.18 hectare site which was previously occupied by an abattoir. Council officials recommended that if Dawn is unable to meet all the requirements in the contract land would be offered to Urban Splash. However,  councillors decided that if an acceptable agreement was not signed with Dawn, the site would be remarketed. 

The quality of each bid was assessed on the basis of design and the financial offer. There have been suggestions that the financial offer made by Dawn was significantly higher than other offers and as a result the design evaluation was overshadowed by the financial element.

According to the council the percentage weighting given to cost and design was 60% for the financial offer and 40% for design. In order to ensure the evaluation was not skewed, a further evaluation process reversed the weighting and another process was undertaken leaving out part of the higher value element of the Dawn proposal. On all three evaluations the Dawn proposals gained the highest score.

The Scottish Government financed the Bellgrove design competition, as an exemplary project to show how design can play a key part in regeneration. The Scottish Government’s planning department gave advice based on experience of working with planning colleagues in Bavaria where design competitions are run in a highly professional fashion by government. The Bellgrove competition involved the development of a detailed brief which addressed issues of community engagement, social inclusion, sustainability and regeneration.

Dawn will be required to meet a BREEAM and/or an EcoHomes rating of excellent and to work with the Category B listed remnants from the former meat market sheds. Four developer consortiums Dawn, Urban Splash, Ogilvie, Dawn and Gladedale were paid £12,500 to participate in the second phase of the competition. Urban Splash was working with Gareth Hoskins on the project and Make and Elder and Cannon were commissioned by the other developer consortiums to draw up a master plan for the area.

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