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2013 target for Tithebarn
Preston will be a building site during the Guild celebrations in 2012.
The city's 450m Tithebarn shopping plans will not be finished until 2013 – at least a year after Preston's next Guild – according to the Duke of Westminster.
And Liverpool and buses are partly to blame.
The Duke said work will not even start in the city until developers Grosvenor – owned by the Duke – finish the huge regeneration project in Liverpool.
He told the Evening Post that Preston won't see the bulldozers move in until Liverpool's city centre is complete in 2009.
That will give Preston just four years to complete the development to meet its revised deadline of 2013 – missing the initial target of 2012 to coincide with the Guild celebrations.
The first planning application for the Preston project is due to be submitted in the middle of next year.
But city leaders in Preston say Liverpool has leap-frogged the city due to that council's unitary status, giving it a free rein to push ahead with plans.
Meanwhile, Preston was held back by wranglings with Lancashire County Council over the relocation of the bus station.
The Duke said: "We are working on it on a step-by-step basis, but we have a big hole in the ground in Liverpool at the moment, which has to be a priority.
"When that is completed then the emphasis and the resources we have been putting in there will switch to Preston."
The Duke, the third-richest man in Britain with an estimated fortune of 7bn, said that the wranglings with Lancashire County Council had been an unnecessary delay and pointed to "problems with planning" which had led to the programme running behind schedule.
Preston council leader Coun Ken Hudson said the delays over the bus station relocation, which was only finalised last year, and the agreement with department store John Lewis had set the Tithebarn behind schedule.
He said: "The county council was quite clear that the size of the new bus station had to reflect the current one, while we were saying we did not need an all singing, all dancing new bus station.
"They were insisting on having 38 bays when we could have quite easily managed with 32, so half-a-dozen bus bays held us up for two years."
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Weather for Preston
Thursday 09 February 2012
Today
Light sleet
Temperature: 3 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Light rain
Temperature: 2 C to 4 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: South east
