The company plans to spend around £5 million on developing a brownfield site in the town on the south side of the River Tyne in the north-east of England. The resulting building will incorporate over 22,000 sq ft of offices from which roughly 300 Network Rail employees will eventually operate.
Plans for the site recently given the green light by the Gateshead authorities also include the development of a further 10,000 sqft of offices, a restaurant and a 138-bedroom hotel.
“This new centre will allow us to bring teams together, creating opportunities to work more efficiently,” said Paul Rutter, route infrastructure maintenance director for Network Rail.
“This scheme will help regenerate a neglected area of Gateshead and create jobs for the local economy as well as delivering a fantastic new mixed-use development for the local area.”
Network Rail said it intends to fund its financial contribution to the project through the sale of a property it currently owns in nearby Newcastle to the Northumbria Police Authority. The company and its development partner 3R Land & Property expect the project to help regenerate the Askew Road area of central Gateshead.
In October, Network Rail signed up to occupy around 3,000 sqft of office space in Birmingham as part of its expansion plan in the Midlands.
Nearby Newcastle’s office space market was recently singled out as one of the best performing in the whole of the UK during the third quarter of 2011 by the property consultancy firm DTZ.
Editor’s notes: As of May 2024, Network Rail’s offices on Askew Road had completed and opened.
In 2022, the total annual office space take-up of office space in Newcastle totalled 239,410 square feet.
In 2023, take-up reached 224,000 square feet, which was just short of 2022’s figure and was 19 per cent below the 5-year annual average, indicating ongoing pressure caused by global uncertainty.