The hot news in Manchester city centre is Juventus star Cristiano Ronaldo has been kicking around plans with Portuguese hotel group Pestana for a luxury 151-bed hotel. The name, Pestana CR7 Manchester, is taken from Ronaldo’s initials and shirt number and is due to open in 2023 overlooking Piccadilly Gardens.
The proposals submitted to Manchester Council involve the redevelopment of the Grade II listed Halls Building (currently home to The Piccadilly Tavern pub), while the empty building next door will be demolished to make way for an 11-storey tower modelled on the surrounding 19th century warehouses.
The property is set to feature a basement gym and rooftop bar, with retail and leisure units planned at street level, along with an outdoor seating area. The £27 million project marks the seventh property in the 50-50 investment partnership. Other hotels in the CR7 brand include sites in Lisbon and Ronaldo’s hometown of Funchal in Madeira, with more openings underway in New York, Madrid, Marrakech and Paris.
French multinational hospitality company, Accor has signed a new flagship Novotel hotel in Liverpool Paddington Village. The new-build flagship 221-room hotel has been agreed under a franchise contract with Liverpool City Council and is set for completion by spring 2022. The hotel will be managed by Legacy Hotels & Resorts, an existing Accor partner and the management company for Accor’s Pullman Liverpool located on the waterfront by the ACC.
The Novotel hotel will be part of Paddington Village, a £1 billion expansion site in the city’s Knowledge Quarter, billed as an international destination for the life-science, healthcare and technology industries.
The 16-storey tower will become the city’s highest, located opposite the new Royal Liverpool Hospital, offering access to workplaces, shops, restaurants and social venues. Novotel Paddington Village will be the second Novotel property in Liverpool and third within the UK.
MIDLANDS & SURROUNDING
With two years until the Commonwealth Games opens in Birmingham, organisers have unveiled a new venue for the event. The former site of Birmingham Wholesale Market which vacated in 2018 will become a key venue for the 2022 competition, as it is transformed into the home of beach volleyball and basketball.
Following the games, the 42-acre site located in the city’s Southside district is due to be redeveloped into Smithfield, featuring a ‘festival square’ accommodating up to 20,000 people for large-scale public events. The £1.5bn development is estimated to take 15 years to complete once work starts in 2022 and will include more than 2,000 homes surrounding a public park and transport links, with accessible green roofscape and eight storey workshop structure.
In Warwickshire, UK hotel developer Vine Hotels recently added the 70-bedroom The Charlecote Pheasant hotel to its portfolio after an unsettled period. The Stratford hotel, which was forced to shut in May when its previous occupier was placed into administration, has reinstated the jobs of 12 staff who were made redundant, including general manager John McGee and other key management positions. Additionally, the hotel has created three new posts and is recruiting further roles in the coming months.
Dating back to the 16th century, the former farmhouse is a character venue offering six meeting rooms, a bar, restaurant and landscaped gardens. Vine Hotels growing portfolio of venues includes five properties in Sheffield and the Best Western Cresta Court hotel in Altrincham.
While in the upper Bedfordshire region, one of the UK’s largest privately-owned single site conference and leisure venues, Wyboston Lakes Resort, has completed a comprehensive refurbishment of The Willows Training Centre to accommodate meetings and training events.
The result of the interior restyling is a comfortable, flexible space, offering easy to use technology, self-service options and break out areas. The refurbishment programme encompasses the venue’s 12 meeting rooms, while an additional meeting room has been created, along with a new boardroom for up to 24 delegates, as well as a creative space, ‘Willows Parkway’, taking design cues from a London tube station.
The public areas, reception, bar, restaurant and many of the venue’s 183 en suite bedrooms have also been upgraded; The Cricket Kitchen, a self-service buffet restaurant now offering added flexibility of a moving wall to provide delegates with more options or added privacy. This is complemented by a newly created alfresco area and self-service facility by Paddy & Scott’s Cafes.
This development follows the resort’s recent £3 million overhaul of its Woodlands Event Centre, bringing Wyboston Lakes Resort’s total spend on capital reinvestment to over £10 million in the last few years.
SCOTLAND
Spanish Hotel brand Melia is set to make its first foray into Scotland following Glasgow City Council giving planning proposals the green light. Plans were submitted in late 2019 for the conversion of a St Vincent Street office block into a 149-room hotel in Glasgow city centre. The Meliá branded INNSiDE hotel will include a bar and restaurant area and a three-storey extension
Plans to open the hotel in former British Telecom headquarters on Argyll Street back in 2017 were never realised. The current project aims to reinstate the grandeur of the longstanding vacant office, returning it to its original use, with The Glasgow Times reporting the hotel will bring over 40 new jobs to the city.
Meliá Hotels International, one of the largest hotel companies in the world, currently operates four in England including one in Manchester with a further two currently under development in Newcastle and Liverpool. The brand operates as four and five-star hotels marketed at the travelling professional with high quality, contemporary and playful interiors.