NORTHGATE could be set for more homes and fewer retailers as city chiefs keep an open mind following a turbulent year on the high street.

Cheshire West and Chester Council was dealt a blow in June when House of Fraser pulled out of its agreement to move into the £300 million city centre development as its anchor tenant – while the company also announced plans to close stores nationwide.

Now the council says it is ‘exploring the options’ – and that could include no replacement anchor store for House of Fraser.

Charlie Seward, deputy chief executive for place at CWAC, said: “We are looking at alternative anchors, and we are having those conversations.

“At the same time we’re looking at whether a scheme like this needs to be anchored in the same way you might have traditionally done with a department store.

“We are looking at all of those options, and whether we need as much retail in the scheme as we might have had in the past.”

Graham Pink, director of place commissioning and commercial management at CWAC, added: “At least we haven’t put a spade in the ground yet. We are not building something and half-way through we have lost a tenant.

“And the market is such at the moment that we need time just to look and see what that number and mix is, and what is right for Chester.

“It’s important that we get that right because the decisions that we make now we are going to live with for more than 60 years for the future of the city.”

Other major retailers such as New Look, Mothercare and Homebase have also announced plans to close stores this year, while Toys R’ Us, Maplin and Poundworld have gone for good.

Charlie insists the council is reviewing its plans for Northgate’s retail offer in light of the national picture – with the ‘hybrid’ planning permission it holds for the site meaning it can be flexible with phase two, which had been set to involve 45 new shops.

“We have not just relentlessly ploughed ahead to carry on developing the scheme that we were fixed on at the time of the planning application,” he said.

“We started out with no residential in there because it just didn’t work commercially. We then came up with around 60 units and doubled it to 120 in the last iteration.

“We are now looking at whether we can push that further, and what sort of residential that might be, and any leisure uses we can bring to the scheme.”

CWAC’s vision for Northgate builds on the ‘One City Plan’ consultation it held with residents in 2012 – with the ambition to create more jobs in the city centre and more opportunities for both residents and workers to spend their cash in town.

Charlie believes that the first phase of Northgate – including the new cinema, market, food and drink outlets and better public realm – is crucial to that and must be brought forward as soon as possible.

“Everybody seems to be united in the view that we need to progress that,” he said. “It creates confidence in the market – you see things are happening and you bring footfall in, you bring expenditure in, it makes it more likely that you are going to succeed with any subsequent phases.

“We are intending, by the end of the year, to have come back to council to get a decision hopefully to proceed with phase one and also to give us the ability to progress the work we need to do to move this work forward.”

While the council hopes to build on the good work that has already been done at nearby Storyhouse and attract retailers that believe Chester’s current retail units are ‘not fit for purpose’, it is keen to make sure Northgate does not damage the rest of the city.

“It has always been our intention to make sure that we don’t just end up lifting people from one end of town to another,” Charlie said.

“Northgate is meant to add to – not detract from – other parts of Chester. It’s not in our interest – we are the council, we are here for the whole city.”

Tim Kenney, property expert and partner at Chester-based consultants KenneyMoore, has been a vocal critic of the council’s plans for Northgate’s second phase – highlighting 200,000sq ft of empty retail space currently in the city.

An open letter he wrote to CWAC, calling on it to rethink Northgate’s ‘unviable’ second phase, was signed by more than 120 businesses.

“Those businesses are the people that we are ultimately trying to support here,” Charlie said. “We don’t claim to be the only people who understand Chester by any means, so they have an awful lot that they can offer us in terms of their expertise and knowledge.”

Tim also labelled plans to knock down the current Crowne Plaza hotel and replace it with another as ‘fundamentally wrong’ – but Charlie says that move is not set in stone.

“I think there’s a perception that somehow we are absolutely committed to just knocking a hotel down and building another one,” he said. “We’re not – what we do have is the ability to do it if it makes sense. And we would only do it if it made sense.”

Meanwhile, a Freedom of Information request sent by Tim to CWAC revealed that the council had spent more than £1.6 million on its development managers Rivington Land.

Charlie said: “Every contract that we spend money over £25,000 on is published on our website, so we are not hiding anything. “We wanted to get the right expertise to come in and help us deliver the best project.

“We constantly refresh the team. We have been through a number of iterations in terms of who we have on board and that continues to be the case. These projects change as they go along.”

With CWAC owning more than 90 per cent of the land for the Northgate development, the council is now waiting on the result of a compulsory purchase order inquiry, which it expects before the end of the year. If that is secured, it can then finally begin work on a scheme which has been in the pipeline for two decades.

Graham added: “It’s about creating an experience. Chester is a special, unique place, and we have great foundations on which to build that experience. “But it’s not just purely about creating a shoppers’ paradise. That’s an old model and that model probably will never come back.”