Bradford Council has purchased the Kirkgate Shopping Centre for £15.5m, paving the way for the council to deliver a new city village and 1,000 new homes.

Bradford Council has just announced that it has bought the almost 50-year-old shopping centre for £15.5m with a view to demolishing it in the coming years as part of its long-standing plans to create a “city village”.

In recent years, the centre has suffered from a high number of vacant units, partly due to competition from The Broadway, which opened in 2015, and changing shopping habits.

Councillor Alex Ross Shaw, the Council’s executive member for planning, regeneration and transport, said with retail increasingly becoming focused around the Broadway, and more high street chains disappearing from UK towns and cities, a shift in this area of the city was needed.

He said: “With Kirkgate demolished the city village can expand. It will become a mix of green space and different housing types.

“It will be housing led, but with commercial space on the ground floors of some of the new buildings. There will be a lot more green infrastructure than in current housing developments.”

He said the aim is to avoid the low cost, low quality housing that has blighted the city centre for years, adding: “We need to get a good housing mix.

“It needs to be something different; we don’t want just one bed flats or bedsits.

“We want more families and more young professionals.

“We need more housing to be built on brownfield sites, and that is what this is doing. We have to make sure it is visually fantastic, not just huge apartment blocks. It will be a high quality development that will introduce something new to the city.”

Along with the space that will be left by the demolition of the Oastler Centre and neighbouring Westgate car park, the changes will create 13 acres of development space in the city.