THE £600 million New Street Gateway project to redevelop and transform Birmingham New Street station and the surrounding area has moved a step closer with the City Council’s drawing up of a Compulsory Purchase Order in respect of a 14-acre site which includes the Pallasades shopping centre above the station.

During the past two years, the City Council and Network Rail have worked closely with all those affected while preparing the CPO and will continue to negotiate acquisition of outstanding property interests with tenants.

But Lord Snape, chairman of Transport West Midlands, has warned that the planned refurbishment of the station, which Commons Transport Select Committee MPs have described as a ‘cosmetic exercise’,would not increase capacity to solve the bottleneck of trains queuing to enter.

Wading into the debate, Birmingham City Council chief executive Stephen Hughes said that plans to build a Grand Central station at Eastside as an alternative to New Street are ‘dead and buried’.

While accepting there would be a problem with capacity “in the not too distant future”, he felt this could be resolved by construction of an £11
billion high-speed rail link between Birmingham Moor Street and London.

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