Council to quit ‘clumsy’ Civic Centre

Exeter City Council is planning to move out of its headquarters in a 1970s’ city centre office block once described by scholars as “clumsy”.

The council says its civic centre base in Paris Street is underused because so many staff now work from home.

Instead, it could be used to provide much-needed housing.

The council’s executive committee voted unanimously to draw up plans to leave the building and use offices elsewhere.

Three locations around the city are proposed, including the Guildhall shopping centre, a building next to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, and a site at Marsh Barton.

A report for the meeting said new ways of ‘hybrid working’ meant the council only occupied one of the three buildings on Paris Street.

Efforts have been made to lease the others to commercial users, but with limited success.

City council chief executive Bindu Arjoon said: “Our existing site is quite challenging, and we have surplus capacity. There hasn’t been the appetite for office space that we might have hoped for.”

The five-storey building on a former car park opened in 1972 as a flagship base for the city council, but architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was unimpressed.

He referred to it in a book on Devon’s architectural treasures as “a clumsy affair”.

The city council shares it with organisations including the police and Citizens Advice.

Cllr Michael Mitchell (Lib Dem, Duryard, and St James) warned that the current market for housing meant a number of sites across the city were not making progress at the moment, and timing the sale of the civic centre correctly would be crucial.

Cllr Diana Moore (Green, St Davids) added: “We don’t want another empty building in the city centre.”

Members also expressed concerns that having council staff spread over three different locations could lead to ‘silo’ working, in which team members are isolated from one another and are not able to collaborate.