Arundel Gate Sheffield: New shipping container complex planned for city centre, serving alcohol till 1am

A licensing application for what is described as a ‘food and retail space constructed from re-fitted shipping containers’ off Arundel Gate has been submitted to Sheffield Council. The application requests permission to screen films and play both live and recorded music there. It would be open until 12.30am from Sunday-Wednesday and from 10am to 1.30am Thursday-Saturday, and would serve alcohol until midnight from Sunday-Wednesday and 1am Thursday-Saturday.

The new application comes despite the limited success of the Container Park at the top of Fargate, which is also built from shipping containers and has shops, restaurants and what should have been a bar upstairs which never opened. The Container Park, operated by Steelyard Kelham, partially opened months behind schedule in mid-October and is set to close at the end of February before potentially moving to a new location within Sheffield.

Councillors this month voted in an emergency meeting to halt work on HIDE bar upstairs at the Container Park, as it emerged costs for the attraction as a whole were set to hit nearly £600,000 – double the original £300,000 estimate. Councillor Shaffaq Mohammed, leader of the Liberal Democrats in Sheffield, called it a ‘comedy of errors’.

There is little detail about the proposals for the Arundel Gate shipping container complex, including exactly where it would be located or how big it would be. The application is from a company called Pond Gate Estate 1 Ltd, which according to Companies House was set up in 2015, is based in Salford, near Manchester, and is described as a ‘non-trading company’. The location for the proposed shipping container attraction is listed only as ‘Podium Area, Arundel Gate Complex’.

The Star has attempted to contact Councillor Mazher Iqbal, co-chair of Sheffield Council’s transport, regeneration and climate policy committee.