Baltic Business Quarter

01/06/2009

Baltic Business Quarter is a centrally located 21.5 hectare site in the heart of Tyneside where over 100,000 square meters of high quality office accommodation is being developed.

The site is adjacent to the town centre and Gateshead Quays with where the riverside attractions of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, The Sage Gateshead, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the facilities on the northern bank of Tyne, are within a five minute walk.

The development of Baltic Business Quarter is key changing an old industrial area into a thriving Business Quarter attracting a high level of inward investment and some of the major companies in the world. The ultimate aim is to create good quality jobs for local people. The Council demanded the area to become one of the most attractive in the world for large companies looking for a new location as well as being a site where modern local businesses would seek to have a presence.

Adit North were engaged to research commercial locations worldwide and to:-

- Confirm the Council’s view that something needed to be done

- Recommend what measures would be needed to enable Gateshead to compete with the rest of the world

- Recommend a business model

- Recommend an action plan

This was a challenging project against a complex background of regulation, legal issues and the need to find the most cost effective solution. It covered both public and private sector and broke new ground on how the two could interface with each other. Total deliverables to Gateshead Council were:

1. Initial research document

2. Second research document

3. Procurement process

Gateshead Council is now working in partnership with leading communications provider Alcatel-Lucent to deploy a world-class Open Access Broadband Network (OABN) at the new Baltic Business Quarter development on the banks of the Tyne. This will support new and emerging services, such as video conferencing, media streaming and disaster recovery, to attract new businesses to the area and contribute to the ongoing economic regeneration of Gateshead. The project is designed to deliver outstanding performance and resilience that matches the best networks in the UK and worldwide. Initially, it will provide up to a massive 10 Gigabytes of bandwidth, enabling the most technology-intensive organisations to locate to Baltic Business Quarter, secure in the knowledge that their critical business processes will be fully supported, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.