There is no doubt that Coda has had a huge influence on the streetscape of South Yorkshire. unLTD’s Matt Holmes spoke to Coda’s managing director Matt Bowker and founder David Cross about our wonderful region and why it’s such a great place to do business.
When I was organising when and where to speak to Matt for this month’s issue, he told us how he wanted to bring in someone to contribute to the feature, choosing his former colleague of 15 plus years David Cross, CEO of Sky House and also a former unLTD cover star.
Coda has been a long-standing fixture on the South Yorkshire property scene, and when I asked Matt and David how they met the answer couldn’t have been more South Yorkshire if it tried.
Matt said: “I first met David in the pub, obviously, in 2003 through some mutual friends and I think after the night ended it was the second-worst hangover of my life.”
It couldn’t have been too bad, as it kick-started a long-term working relationship.
“So that was my introduction to David and what he was doing, and I was excited by his energy and vision. I started doing some work for David and over a period of time his work got to such a level where I joined him full time.”
Matt left his role at a larger practice to work above a hairdressers in Birdwell, Barnsley, eventually moving to Kelham Island in a building with no insulation, broken windows and a leaking roof. Kelham Island is where Coda still lives today, albeit in a different office without the aforementioned features.
David added: “We’ve been friends and business colleagues for 20 years.”
Next, I wanted to dive into the main reason we were here to speak. I asked both: “why is South Yorkshire a brilliant place to do business?”
“Well for me, it’s home,” said Matt. “That’s the main reason, I’m from Barnsley. I’m very proud of that fact and working with Coda I’ve got to know Sheffield a lot more and come to care about the city. I’ve lived overseas and been to university in Leeds and Manchester, but something always brought me back home.
“We’ve invested in a new office in Sheffield, a lot of our work is predominately Sheffield and we’re passionate about the development of the city as a better place for everyone and new residents.
“There’s a huge amount of potential in Sheffield and we want to help and be part of that.”
David shares the sentiment as he’s also from Barnsley, despite his parents’ family all being from Sheffield. He said: “I think we have an unusual perspective of coming from Barnsley but doing stuff in Sheffield means that we’re not parochial and defensive of Sheffield above all else.
“Everyone calls Sheffield a big city with a village feel, and to some it’s an insult, but to me it’s part of its charm. My kids always laugh about how we know everybody and wherever we go in the world, we always end up bumping into someone that we know and it’s nice- I think it’s part of the friendliness of the region.
“It’s often rolled out that we don’t shout about what we do well enough, but I think that we do, we just do it in our own way, and I think there are lots of things to be proud of from our region.
What we’ve delivered in terms of projects, not just us at Coda, Sky-House and Crossbow Investments, but what other practices and developers do, there’s a lot of passion in the area to do things better and think differently and I think what I love about it the most.”
I wanted to see what both Matt and David thought about particular areas of South Yorkshire which have been doing particularly well over the past few years. Of course, as the home of Coda, Matt spoke fondly of Kelham Island, following it’s huge regeneration.
Matt said: “20 years ago Kelham was a backwater red light district, and then the first development at Cornish Works happened and since then it’s just been a one-way track with lots of new investments, and that’s even since we moved into Sheffield. It’s been transformational with all the bars and restaurants and number of new homes that have been delivered and the people living there.
“I would also say Waverley, which we’re quite active in. The AMRC is fantastic and some of the people there like Boeing, McLaren and Rolls Royce. There are already 1000 homes there, a school and there’s going to be a new town centre called Olive Lane that will have new shops, local amenities, a medical centre, things like that.
“There’s also going to be a new Sky-House scheme that’s high-density urban living, denser than the suburban type housing in Waverley. There’s also talk about a new railway station, so I think that’s a real achievement for South Yorkshire that kind of spans the Rotherham-Sheffield divide.”
What about their home of Barnsley? Matt told me about how the Glassworks development has brought a new buzz to the town centre, and he takes his hat off to what they have delivered in attracting people back into the area.
David told me about what is happening in Doncaster. “It’s amazing what is happening there right now. What the local authority has done there with the projects around the centre; the new library, the new shopping areas, all the new area around the train station square, it’s all on the up as seen with them achieving city status.
“The leadership in Doncaster is fantastic, and so are the opportunities – with the fastest connectivity to London in the region and the M18. The airport is the single biggest opportunity for our region to expand exponentially, and the recent news about its closure is hugely disappointing. If the Government was serious about levelling up, they would do something here. It’s a huge blow to the region.”
I asked David how – if at all – his relationship had changed with Coda since he stepped down to focus on his other ventures. He said: “It’s basically the same really. The WhatsApp group has changed its name but every project we do is always with Coda and always will be, we share the same DNA when it comes to design and what we’re interested in.”
Matt went on to say: “We spent the best part of two decades talking about design and urbanism, and we’ve kind of gone along a similar journey. It just works really well.”
An exciting project that Coda is working on with David is the Sky-House development in Oughtibridge in North Sheffield, which is an area of the city that has seen its fortunes change in recent years. The Fox Valley development in Stocksbridge is a fantastic exemplar of what magic is happening in that part of the city.
David said how they have huge sales interest in the development within their Oughtibridge Mill food hall concept overlooking the River Don.
Lastly, having had such a legacy within South Yorkshire has meant that, between them, they’ve had a significant impact on the region. Do they feel a responsibility in terms of serving communities or design?
David said: “Absolutely. It’s everything we’re about. Our entire mission and values of the business is about what we want to do. We’re partly funded by the South Yorkshire Pension Authority and part of our commitment was that we build great places and that we will go above and beyond to do beautiful design.
“We also do ESG corporate social responsibility type things where we sponsor kids to plant trees. No one’s making us do this, but when we’re making places, we should be making places like Saltaire. Nice places break the rules, and it’s our commitment to do it, but you won’t believe the battles we have to go through to build nice places.”
From a design perspective, Matt said: “I’ve been thinking recently, what kind of buildings that Coda have built will be here for another 100 years. I don’t want our architecture to be here for 30 years and then be replaced with something else. There’s been a lot of that happening in the last 50 years.
“We knew how to build beautiful places that people loved. That’s what we tried to do with Olive Lane. We didn’t want a big box retail park with a huge car park in the middle, the whole vision was centred around creating a street that was centred on people with a variety of uses, “I want people to think Coda built those buildings and made a huge contribution for a better Sheffield and wider South Yorkshire region.”
