Gorse Stacks

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The curiously named Gorse Stacks lies between the city end of Hoole Way and Frodsham Street. The name derives from this area formerly being used to safely store brushwood and other wood fuels outside the Walls for the city's bakeries.

Gorse Stacks was once the hub of a thriving commercial district centred upon the ancient cattle market. The cattle market was demolished in the 1960s to make way for a traffic island on the inner ring road (known as the Gorse Stacks roundabout). The area around Gorse Stacks is scruffy and run down and is in urgent need of improvement. The south side of the roundabout has long been a car park, but has been earmarked for development since the 1960s.

In the late 1980s, proposals were made to build a hotel on Gorse Stacks but these never came to fruition. A new planning report in 1995 proposed enclosing the entire area within a new "Millennium Wall", based around a landscaped "cultural quarter" which would contain galleries, shops, restaurants, a new public square and an open-air market. The cost of these proposals were estimated at £118 million. Most of the funding was expected to come from the private sector and local authorities, while an application for a grant of £60 million was applied for from the Millennium Commission. The application failed and the plans were abandoned, perhaps fortunately, as the architect drawings were heavily criticised for being out of keeping with the surrounding area.

In the early 2000s, Chester City Council announced new plans to demolish the car park and build a new council headquarters on the site, having outgrown the existing premises at the Forum, which itself is due for demolition as part of the Northgate Development plans. The design for the new council building is almost universally unpopular and has been nicknamed the Glass Slug.

When the Conservative Party won control of the city council in May 2007, it announced it would halt plans to build the Glass Slug. It also proposed to use the Gorse Stacks site to build a new arts centre. The local organisation, Chester in Concert, has long campaigned for the erection of a purpose-built concert hall, exhibition and arts centre on Gorse Stacks. It remains to be seen what the future holds in store for Gorse Stacks.