Noss on Dart - A brighter future

After a couple of false dawns, the development of Noss on Dart marina will very shortly take a big step forward with the submission of a planning application. The proposed £75m investment in the site will be one of the largest local infrastructure investments for decades.

By The Dart spoke exclusively to Pete Bradshaw , CEO of Premier Marinas, the owner of Noss On Dart.

Tell us a bit about Premier Marinas? We’re a 20+ year old business owning and operating nine of the UK’s most prestigious marinas. Premier’s marinas are all based on the South Coast and our locations include: Sovereign Harbour in Eastbourne, East Sussex; Brighton Marina in East Sussex; Chichester Marina in West Sussex; Southsea, Port Solent, Gosport and Swanwick marinas in Hampshire; Falmouth Marina in Cornwall and most recently Noss-on Dart here on the River Dart. We offer over 5,000 moorings in a combination of wet and dry berths.

What’s special about you? Our vision for Premier Marinas is to be the finest marina operator in the UK and we aim to achieve this by providing our customers with quality marinas in good locations and superb customer service.

Uniquely, we’re owned (since 2015) by the Wellcome Trust – a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone; they’re the second largest charitable foundation in the world and one way or another, our profits go back into supporting their charitable aims. They are very supportive of our aspirations to grow the business and, in particular, to develop the Noss site. The capital needed to develop this site is considerable but it is all being provided for by our shareholder – we don’t have to borrow from the banks to do what we plan.

We’re rarely the most expensive marina in the areas in which we operate but we regularly score very highly in customer satisfaction surveys, something that we monitor very closely.

Our guiding principles for the success of our business include making sure that our berth holders and visitors enjoy the time they spend in our marinas and we believe that providing a friendly and efficient service is key to that. We focus on every aspect of our facilities, from car parking to quality shower facilities and site security, all with the aim of significantly enhancing our customers’ boating experience.

Why Noss? Why wouldn’t we buy Noss – it’s in a stunning location. No matter what facilities and infrastructure we create around our marinas it’s the nearby cruising grounds and the quality of the location that first drives a customer’s choice of where to moor their boat. The River Dart ticks both those boxes for many boat owners. It’s long been a part of our plans to be here.

The South Coast is where we are and where we plan to stay – our business strategy is pretty clear – we want to remain focused on the main boating centres along the South Coast – and The Dart is probably at the top of that list.

Are you a property developer or a marine business? We’re a marine business first and foremost – and importantly, we continue to own and operate our sites long after any development is completed. That makes us very different from a traditional property developer.

Does the development of Noss present any special challenges? It’s obviously a challenge developing a site of this size (37 acres) in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty so we have to be sensitive to the particular constraints that creates. But we have done this successfully before at our other marinas eg. Chichester Marina where we developed a new boatyard and onshore facilities that picked up on the local architectural style to blend easily into the environment.

The Noss site is in a poor state of repair – possibly 20 years past its sell by date. Many of the buildings are dilapidated and too unsafe to enter whilst the marina itself is being held together with love and care (and lots of money). Something needs to be done with it in the next 12-24 months or we may lose the opportunity.

That said, the site lends itself well to the development we have planned. It’s very clear where the marina should be, where we site the boatyard and where we should store the boats and park the cars. The topography also naturally presents the best place to locate any residential development.

The South Devon AONB Board has understandably been keen that we don’t have acres of parking space with shiny roofs being visible from the river. The solution has been a decked car park which, because of the topography, fits neatly up against the rock and doesn’t sit proud of the horizon. This compresses the required space, makes the car parking far less visible, and frees up land for better use elsewhere.

When does the application get submitted? Hopefully it will have gone in by the time this article is published. It will be a detailed planning application for the marina, boatyard, commercial and administrative units, parking and storage and the waterfront hotel but for the moment just outline permission for most of the residential development. We’ve consulted widely with many stakeholders and the general public. With all its history, I think we’ve seen a desire from stakeholders that something must happen to this site; and if something is going to happen, what’s the best we can do with it.

How will the marina develop? We try to make our marinas fit the location.

For Noss, we plan a new marina configuration for around 232 berths in addition to dry stack storage for 100 or so smaller motor craft. The wet berths will be easy to use with plenty of space for longer and wider yachts – there’ll be berths for boats of 9m – 25m with a likely average length of 12.5m.

We’d like more berths but this is as many as we can fit comfortably or is considered safe for navigation. The expansion of the marina itself will be less extensive than envisaged by the previous owners and this is because we are not planning to do significant amounts of dredging.

Dry stacks are relatively new to the UK market and are cheaper than wet berthing. We have 3 of them across our marina portfolio and they are proving a more affordable and easy way for people to get into boating. Maintenance costs for owners are also very low as the boats are kept out of the water and dry stacks are very secure. They are really ideal for small motor boats and RIBs – but not suitable for jet skis.

We’ll have the capacity for approx 70 spaces for onshore storage in the summer and over 100 in the winter. Land is always in great demand but the capacity at Noss is good for a marina of its size. But it’s important for us that these storage facilities are financially sustainable. One of the ways it works for us is making sure there is a constant flow of boats through the yard and alongside that, keeping our marine services tenants busy year round.

There will also be a self-storage facility on site for those owners wanting to store their boating equipment ashore – this is something that’s proved very popular at our other marinas.

What about the boatyard facilities? We actually love boatyards!

Marinas are unique micro economies – the businesses on a marina all depend on each other. We have a full service boatyard on all our sites – we want customers to be able to get everything done on their boats by the people they want to do it.

We don’t run closed sites – we allow third party contractors to work on our sites albeit we do regulate and monitor them insofar as they must meet the appropriate health & safety standards and register with us when they’re on site.

We also put a lot of effort into providing commercial space for local marine services – we work hard to find the right partners that best service our berth-holders. We’re planning, therefore, to build 21 commercial units and a new home for South Devon College.

We may see some relocation of existing marine services from elsewhere but we also hope to encourage new start-ups as well as businesses in their infancy (e.g currently operating out of a van). Our experience shows that by supporting tenants we can encourage their businesses to grow - especially as they’ll have a large part of their client base accessible on the site. Together with the South Devon College, we’re keen on developing a centre of excellence for marine services in and around Dartmouth.

We’re planning to house a new 75 tonne boat hoist and build a new dock facility for craning boats out. This hoist will be larger than anything else on the river and will be convenient for private and commercial craft across most of South Devon. It will especially provide a convenient facility for local commercial vessels such as fishing trawlers who require a quick lift out and re-launch to carry out their essential maintenance work.

Why build a hotel? Marinas are increasingly seen as leisure destinations so a hotel is an important part of the development – if it was just a marina, it would suffer somewhat from being geographically rather isolated. The hotel makes it more of a destination and adds a buzz to the place. It also has important employment benefits.

We’ll create a passenger ferry link with Dartmouth and we are in the final stages of negotiation about this with the Dart Harbour Authority. It’s obviously an expensive service to start up and because of this we may end up running it ourselves – although we would much prefer that an experienced local operator took it on.

The hotel will have 50 rooms, two restaurants, a spa and some adjoining apartments that are likely to be run by the hotel.

It’s been one of the more challenging bits of the design and we need to find the right operator to run it – we’re presently in dialogue with 3 or 4 experienced and reputable hotel operations.

The site will also house a reinterpretation of the Philips building – we’ll try and keep the iconic end wall (some significant engineering challenges in keeping this elevation – it has some pretty big cracks in it!) and build into the back of it. At the end of this building, there’ll be a café/bistro with great views up the river.

Above the café there’ll be a Heritage Centre that will retell the history of the site – we’ll be able to exhibit many of the artifacts we’ve found on the site as well as those in the Dartmouth Museum collection but who don’t have the public space to show them. On a similar point, we’ve been consulting with relatives of those who died during the bombing of the shipyard during WWII about how we suitably incorporate the current memorial.

And the residential development? The work on the marina, hotel, boatyard etc will commence first - so it’s all money out. The residential development will then follow. Our ownership allows us to do it in this order – normally a huge development such as this might see the residential completed first in order to fund the marina and boatyard development but that just delays the employment and economic benefits coming into the community

There’s been lots of debate about how we design and develop the residential with a density and design that is suitable to the site. We’ve come to the conclusion that less is more. There are 3 areas for development. What we call ‘Dart View’ (on the right as you enter the site where Noss House is currently) will house a variety of apartments and terraced units. An area that we call South Bay will have lower density units with green space, plus what our design team has termed ‘deck houses‘ which cantilever over the quay wall or on piles in the bay.

At the top of hill, as you enter from Bridge Road, we own three houses which will be redeveloped.

The residential development exists to fund the substantial infrastructure investment required e.g. a new quay wall, a public slipway, a new hoist bay etc. We’ll be spending many millions on the general infrastructure, on developing the marina itself and on strengthening, upgrading and widening the railway bridge – it will still be single track but wider. The hotel, commercial units etc will require further investment. Permission for the work on the bridge has already been granted and work will start shortly on a new pedestrian bridge. The main bridge work will take place in November and December when there’ll be pedestrian access to the lower part of the site but limited road access.

Large scale residential development is not one of our core competencies, being a marina owner and operator and therefore we are likely to seek an experienced property partner to help us do this or take it on themselves.

What do you think will be the impact of all this on the local economy? We expect that on site employment will eventually be between 150-200 jobs. There’ll be an ongoing and significant economic multiplier effect on the local economy in addition to the initial £75m boost of investment that will be spent to develop the site fully. We’ll also be creating significant income for the District and County Councils e.g. a New Homes bonus, recurring Council Tax from the residential units and, of course, substantial business rates.

Our ethos will be to try to work on this development with as many local suppliers as possible as long as there’s the expertise and appetite to get involved. It doesn’t always work out this way but we believe it’s important to try to do so.

We are planning that we can complete the main phase of the development, excluding the residential side, within 3 years of breaking ground. It’s an ambitious timescale but doable subject to unforeseen occurrences.

We have an aspiration to build something very special here, to create one of the best marinas in the UK. We think it’s a great site and this river is quite unique. The vast majority of this site will remain in our ownership for a long time to come, so it really matters to us. We’re very excited by the project.

First published By The Dart magazine May 2017

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