Watson Construction is Bury Council's preferred bidder for about 215 homes at Pyramid Park and Q-Park. Miss March 2029 and a £1.73m grant is clawed back.

Two pieces of derelict land in the middle of Bury have a builder attached to them for the first time. Watson Construction Ltd has been named Bury Council’s preferred bidder to build about 215 homes at Pyramid Park and Q-Park, and a report to Cabinet on Wednesday 9 September asked members to approve selling both sites to the firm.

The report sets out roughly 138 homes at Pyramid Park and 77 apartments on top of the Q-Park car park, with exact numbers to be settled at the planning stage.

It also sets out a clock the council cannot stop. Under the terms of a government grant, Pyramid Park has to be sold by 31 March 2027 and the homes finished by 31 March 2029, or the council hands back £1.73 million.

The two sites

Both plots sit on the southern edge of the town centre, next to Bury Interchange and Bury College, and both are in the “Southern Gateway” zone of the council’s 2022 town centre masterplan.

Pyramid Park Q-Park
Size 7.4 acres (3 hectares) 1 acre
Where Off Market Street, south of Angouleme Way Knowsley Street, opposite the Town Hall
What is there now Overgrown, derelict land The empty slab above a 404-space car park
Vacant since The park was decommissioned around 2010 2009
Homes proposed About 138, mixed types and tenures About 77 apartments

Pyramid Park was the goods yard. The report says the land formerly held Bury Knowsley Street railway station and its yard, part of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. British Rail closed the line and station in 1970. The site was reclaimed in the 1970s as an informal public open space called Townside Fields, then decommissioned around 2010 because hardly anyone used it and it attracted anti-social behaviour.

The council’s own description of it now is blunt: overgrown with vegetation, strewn with litter and debris, and still attracting anti-social behaviour. It sits below the level of the streets around it, with poor visibility and no level access in from the town centre.

Q-Park is the one people walk past every day. The three-storey undercroft car park on Knowsley Street was built in 2008 as part of phase one of the Townside scheme, alongside the Townside Primary Care Centre, 3 and 6 Knowsley Place and the 115-room Premier Inn. It was deliberately built strong enough to carry another six storeys on top.

Phase two was meant to put an apartment block up there around 2009 and 2010. The recession killed it, and the slab has been an empty fenced plot facing the Town Hall ever since.

How Watson was chosen

The council ran a four-stage Competitive Flexible Procedure, advertised on the government’s Find a Tender service from April 2026 under the Procurement Act 2023.

  • Four eligible bids came in at the first stage.
  • Three cleared the minimum scores and went through to tender.
  • Only two final tenders were submitted.
  • The two were scored 65 per cent on quality and 35 per cent on price.

Watson ranked first. The company number given in the report is 08621624, and the council says it will seek a parent company guarantee from Watson Construction (Holdings) Ltd.

What Watson has proposed is not a single block of flats. The report describes a mix of apartments and family townhouses alongside extra-care housing, a specialist dementia unit, sheltered accommodation and homes for care leavers, with improved routes through the site and across to Bury Interchange.

The council launched an Extra Care Housing Strategy in May 2026 with a target of delivering across five site areas in ten years. Q-Park is intended to be one of them, partly because the Townside Primary Care Centre is next door.

The dates that matter

Pyramid Park and Q-Park: the timetable set by the grant A timeline of eight stages. October 2023, a 1.73 million pound brownfield grant is awarded for Pyramid Park. April 2026, the council starts the search for a developer through Find a Tender. July 2026, Conlon Construction is appointed to clean up the Pyramid Park site. 9 September 2026, Cabinet is asked to approve the sale of both sites to Watson Construction. Autumn 2026, remediation finishes and TfGM starts work on the Metrolink footbridge. During 2027, Watson submits a planning application and aims to start on site. 31 March 2027 is the deadline to sell Pyramid Park. 31 March 2029 is the deadline for the homes to be finished. The timetable the grant sets The last two dates are binding: miss them and the £1.73m comes back off the council. October 2023 £1.73m brownfield grant awarded for Pyramid Park April 2026 Search for a developer opens on Find a Tender July 2026 Conlon Construction appointed to clean up the site 9 September 2026 Cabinet asked to approve the sale to Watson Autumn 2026 Clean-up finishes, footbridge work begins During 2027 Planning application, then a start on site 31 March 2027 DEADLINE: Pyramid Park must be sold 31 March 2029 DEADLINE: the homes must be finished Source: Bury Council Cabinet report, Disposal of Pyramid Park and Q-Park (Part A), 9 September 2026. Graphic by The Bury Post.

The grant is the reason for the hurry. The council was awarded £1.73m from the government’s second Brownfield Land Release Fund in October 2023, to pay for technical work and land remediation at Pyramid Park. Conlon Construction is doing that work now, on a roughly 15-week programme running west to east across the site, finishing in autumn 2026.

The grant agreement attaches two milestones to the money. Sell by 31 March 2027, finish the homes by 31 March 2029.

The report is explicit about what happens if either slips. It says the council would face “a full grant claw back of the £1.73 million”, and that without public money to deal with the site’s problems, Pyramid Park “would continue to remain a significantly unviable and potentially void site for years, if not decades”.

That is also why the council rejected simply putting the land on the open market. The report says an open-market buyer could land-bank the site with no guarantee of delivery, and that restarting the process now would make the deadlines unachievable anyway.

It is tied to the Interchange rebuild

The two schemes are physically linked. The first stage of the £85m Bury Interchange redevelopment includes a new pedestrian footbridge over the tram lines, running from Pyramid Park across to Townside at Knowsley Place, where Q-Park sits.

TfGM’s footbridge and platform work is due to start in late autumn 2026 and run to early 2028, before the main Interchange rebuild begins. The report says the remediation scheme at Pyramid Park (planning reference 70903) has planning conditions interlinked with TfGM’s southern access works (reference 71834), so one holds up the other.

The footbridge is meant to be a second, permanent, step-free way into the Interchange. Bury College asked for it: students would walk through Pyramid Park to reach the trams.

What has not been published

  • The price. Valuations, the commercial terms and the scoring breakdown are all in Part B of the report, which is exempt under paragraph 3 of the access to information rules, covering financial and business affairs. The council says independent RICS red book valuations were done on both sites.
  • The other bidders. The full list of bidders and their scores is in Part B.
  • The decision. As of Thursday 10 September the council’s own decision page for this item still showed a status of “For Determination”, and no minutes from the 9 September Cabinet meeting had been published. The recommendation asked Cabinet to approve the disposal and to delegate the contracts, the commercial terms and the final capital receipt to two executive directors, the council Leader and the Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Growth.

The land value is also likely to move. The report notes the eventual offer will be affected by Section 106 contributions agreed through planning, and by biodiversity net gain requirements that may need off-site compensation.

Some practical complications

  • The car park keeps running. Q-Park Ltd holds a long lease on the undercroft and will stay in occupation throughout construction. The developer has to work around it for anything below slab level, such as drainage. Town centre car park tariffs are on our parking in Bury page.
  • Six leases affect the Q-Park site, three of them apparent occupational leases. Tenants named in the report are NHS Property Services Ltd and Six Town Housing Ltd. The original lease was granted by Ask Townside (No.1) Ltd.
  • A footpath crosses Pyramid Park. A non-definitive public right of way runs through the site from Town Fields Close. It is temporarily closed while the remediation work is done, and the report says the incoming developer must build it back into the scheme.
  • Height triggers extra checks. The report flags that under the Building Safety Act 2022, any new structure of seven storeys or over 18 metres goes through an enhanced regulatory process during design and construction.

What it means for you

  • Nothing is built yet, and nothing is approved by a planning committee. A planning application is expected during 2027. That is your chance to comment, and it will appear on our Bury planning news page.
  • The land will stay fenced for a while longer. Remediation runs to autumn 2026, and the right of way from Town Fields Close is shut until it is done.
  • Expect building work next to the Interchange from late 2026. The footbridge and platform work runs to early 2028, before the main rebuild starts. Journey planning is on our Bury tram times page.
  • If it lands, it is a real dent in the housing target. The borough has a statutory target of an average of 450 new homes a year over the 2022 to 2043 local plan period. About 215 homes on two derelict town centre plots is most of six months of that, on land nobody has to build a road out to.

Sources