PLY18 - Plymouth History Centre and land at Tavistock Place / Chapel Street

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Land at North Hill and Tavistock Place is allocated for a History Centre, together with a higher education and/or business-led mixed use development on Tavistock Place / Chapel Street with enabling student housing development in cluster flat format. The History Centre will be a major new visitor attraction and unique historic archive and learning space for the city which will support the regeneration of the North Hill / Tavistock Plan cultural quarter. It will bring together the existing City Museum collections with new exhibition space, including the conversion of the former St Luke’s Church, together with a landmark modern archive space for the City’s historic archives. Tavistock Place will be closed to through traffic to form a public piazza, with new pedestrian and cycling links through to North Hill and Chapel Street.

Development should provide for the following: 

  1. The conversion of the listed museum and library buildings and former St Luke’s Church to provide high quality exhibition spaces.
  2. Demolition of the rear of the library and construction of a new extension to provide a café, exhibition space, learning space and landmark ‘archive box’.
  3. Construction of a storage and delivery store adjacent to St Luke’s Church.
  4. Soft landscaping to include new street trees and green wall together with shrub planting.
  5. Creation of new pedestrian and cycling links to improve the permeability of the area for pedestrians and cyclists between Chapel Street and North Hill.
  6. High quality street frontages and active ground floor uses.
  7. A development which respects the site's heritage assets and context, as informed by a heritage character assessment to be undertaken for the proposal.