The Cave Street plans were agreed by the City Council's Cabinet on Wednesday 10 November 2021 and draft designs have been developed prior to submitting a planning application.
The consultation runs until Saturday 28 May.
The £9.7 million plans will see Standingford House in Cave Street (off St Clements) demolished and the site redeveloped to create a flexible and accessible new workspace. The Council aims to submit a planning application following the consultation and it is anticipated work on the site will start at the end of the year.
The Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) secured £1.13m of investment towards the project via the government’s Local Growth Fund, and is helping support the proposal for 30% of the workspace to be let at 80% of market rates.
Standingford House is a 1960s light industrial building owned and managed by the City Council.
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While it currently houses 14 businesses and organisations, the building is in need of both repair and modernisation to meet current and future efficiency standards. It also has poor accessibility, with no wheelchair provision and no lift access.
The City Council investigated a range of options, including refurbishing the existing building. The building is now at the end of its life and redeveloping the site is the best use of funds as well as providing the right space to meet the needs of modern businesses and offers the opportunity to provide more than double the existing area of workspace.
The new workspace will see a significantly increased gross internal floor area from 9,569 sq.ft. GIFA to approximately 18,700 sq.ft, making more efficient use of an important site allocated for employment use in the Oxford Local Plan.
The new three-storey building will be flexible to enable fledgling businesses to easily scale from one desk to a self-contained office. It will offer a range of different spaces, such as breakout spaces, meeting rooms, offices and single desks, offering businesses a choice currently unavailable to them.
The new building will be fully accessible and aspires to achieve the highest Building Research Establishment's Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) rating of 'outstanding'.
Leader of Oxford City Council, Councillor Susan Brown, said: "The redevelopment of the Cave Street site will provide a new modern, flexible, accessible and energy-efficient office space, alongside new tree planting and other landscaping. The building will include space at affordable rates to provide start-up business space for Oxford’s entrepreneurs.
"The views of local people matter and will be included as part of the planning application, as the information gathered from residents will be used in the Statement of Community Consultation."
