Key Priorities

  • To ensure that Central Square becomes the destination of choice for major employers and to attract and secure new investment and high end users in the financial and professional services sector
  • Improve the public realm and connectivity throughout the area to ensure that visitors have a positive first impression of the city
  • To strive for the highest standards of design and construction for all new buildings in the area
  • Ensure effective management of the environment and traffic, and considerably strengthen the street scene throughout the City
  • Improve pedestrian facilities, develop vibrant ground floor uses and better signage
  • Create a multifunctional civic square with opportunities for accessible and family friendly events using the newly developed public spaces
  • Maintain Central Square as an exemplary location that will be regarded as clean, safe, well- maintained and managed; a place that is actively looked-after and cared-for
  • Create and promote a strong brand identity for the area to assist in solidifying the concept
  • Deliver a new, distinctly urban, part of the city centre that builds on Cardiff’s city centre success and encourages a mix of high quality developments
  • Integrate the transport needs of the area, including pedestrian and cycle movements, with the wider city centre transport strategy and identify opportunities for developing linkages to surrounding areas to improve functionality and connectivity.

Key Deliverables

City centres are dynamic places and they play a critical role in generating jobs and prosperity. Central Square is the gateway to Cardiff and the wider city region for many potential investors, new residents and visitors, and so its role in providing a positive image and framework for inward investment (in its many guises) cannot be underestimated.

Our plan seeks to provide a route towards the delivery of this vision for Central Square which will be…..

a place to invest

Cardiff’s economic growth will be driven by the expansion of a number of sectors, particularly financial and professional services, media and creative, life sciences, public administration and leisure, tourism and the service sector.

Central Square benefits from Tier Two Assisted Area Grant status and will play an important role in capturing the attention of potential inward investors.

a place to work

The city centre must continue to grow and diversify its employment base. The key sectors that will underpin the delivery of the economy for Cardiff are critically dependent on public transport, ensuring employees from a wide geographical base can easily get to work. Central Square is adjacent to the Capital’s public transport hub.

a place to live

There’s a revival of city centre living, and now Cardiff has an entirely new type of consumer to cater for. The number of people choosing to live in the city centre will continue to grow and will not only benefit the economy of the city, but also its vitality, offering animation and activity around the clock.

a place people can get to

Ensuring that the growing and increasingly successful city centre remains accessible to its workers and customers will consolidate the city’s economic position. One of the key objectives of the Central Square scheme will be to remove transport as a constraint on future growth by encouraging people to make more use of the public transport system.