Contract award
ECF selected for 2,300-home Portsmouth city centre scheme
By Staff Writer | 12 August 2026
Portsmouth City Council has named ECF as its development partner for City Centre North, a 13.25-hectare brownfield site that could deliver up to 2,300 homes.
Portsmouth City Council has selected ECF as development partner for City Centre North. The site is a 13.25-hectare former car park in the heart of the city, once home to the demolished Tricorn shopping centre.
The land has the potential to deliver up to 2,300 homes alongside new commercial space, leisure facilities and more than 240,000 square feet of public realm, including a major urban park.
ECF is the regeneration partnership between Homes England's National Housing Bank, L&G and Muse. It will now test development options before entering a full development agreement.
What has actually been agreed
The distinction matters. Selection as development partner is not a development agreement, and the current stage is an options and viability exercise rather than a commitment to build. A scheme of this scale on a single brownfield site will turn on infrastructure cost, tenure mix and the phasing that makes the early stages fundable.
Plans include new homes across a mix of tenures, workspace, leisure uses and improved pedestrian connections intended to increase footfall and support local businesses.
We're looking forward to working with Portsmouth City Council over the coming months to explore the site in detail, test what's deliverable here, and build the case for how we might take this forward together.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman, ECF
Timing and what follows
The partnership's language is deliberately conditional, and the programme should be read that way. The options testing period comes first, the development agreement second, and planning after that. Contractors and consultants tracking this site should expect the meaningful procurement to sit some way beyond the current announcement.
ECF's existing regeneration portfolio includes schemes elsewhere in the country, and the partnership structure, with a public funder alongside an institutional investor and a developer, is the model increasingly used where a council owns a large site and lacks the balance sheet to develop it alone.
The site's history
The land was once home to the Tricorn shopping centre, since demolished, and has been in use as a large surface car park. Bringing a site of 13.25 hectares in a city centre back into development is unusual in itself, and the scale is what allows a mixed-use scheme with more than 240,000 square feet of public realm, including a major urban park.
The partnership structure is worth noting on its own. ECF brings together Homes England's National Housing Bank, L&G and Muse, so public funding, institutional investment and development capability sit inside a single vehicle. That model is increasingly used where a council owns a large site but cannot carry the development risk alone.
Plans include homes across a mix of tenures alongside workspace and leisure uses, with improved pedestrian connections intended to raise footfall for existing businesses. Those connections are usually among the first elements value engineered when viability tightens, so they are a reasonable early test of how firm the scheme is.