The £2.5bn York Central scheme is a huge opportunity to rethink the city centre but campaigners worry they will end up with an off-the-shelf development
On an area the size of 63 football pitches next to York’s Victorian railway station, work is under way on the UK’s biggest city centre regeneration scheme, which will expand the area by a third.
The £2.5bn project, called York Central, aims to transform a vast 45-hectare (111-acre) site – once a major railway manufacturing hub with iron foundries, signalling workshops and wagon stables, now mostly a drab car park – into housing and offices.