Commitment has been made to bring a new Sainsbury’s at the heart of North Liverpool’s ‘Project Jennifer’ regeneration scheme to fruition on time without further delays, according to St Modwen.

Following the news this week that the supermarket giant is revising its plans to bring a scaled back store to the Great Homer Street area by a later date of spring 2017, Paul Batho, projects director at developer St Modwen insists: “We remain on track and are committed to delivering the new district centre on Great Homer Street.

“Sainsbury’s has recently given its public commitment to opening a new full-range store in 2017 and the on-site activity will continue and hopefully people will note the progress on site and hopefully any concerns that people have will be allayed by that.”

With Sainsbury’s preparing to submit new plans for a smaller than originally planned store to Liverpool City Council, after claiming “the food retail market and customer shopping patterns have changed considerably” since the previous proposals were put forward, the new store which will also be accompanied by around 80,000 sq ft of further retail space and a proposed health centre is now facing a nine-month delay for completion.

Back in May this year Steven Knowles, regional director for St Modwen, told Your Move that the supermarket was still due for delivery in summer/autumn 2016 and enabling works were being carried out in order for Sainsbury’s to start working on site in late summer this year.

However, following this week’s developments, Paul says: “We broke ground in November last year, we did a huge amount of work to get the site ready for them and it’s being handed over for them in the next couple of weeks, and Sainsbury’s are planning on starting some sort of site enabling works in the fairly near future.”

Paul also says that new smaller plans will not leave excess space around the Great Homer Street area, given that a large site has already been cleared to make way for the development.

He adds: “Because the previous store was on stilts, with dropping it to the ground and amending the servicing and the rest of it, it still pretty much takes up, to a large degree, the same site that it previously occupied so it doesn’t mean that there’s going to be any spare space thrown up by the move. It simply just drops it to the ground so there are no real physical changes other than that.”

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