The developer says Bristol has an ‘acute shortage’ of student accommodation – a residents’ association disagrees
06:00, 08 Jun 2026
The former St Joseph’s care home, run by the Little Sisters of the Poor religious order, on Cotham Hill between 1869 and 2025.
Plans to convert it to accommodation for 131 students were revealed in March 2026(Image: Harringay Real Estate)
A Cotham residents’ group is fighting against plans to create yet another Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) block in Bristol. Developer Harringay Real Estate wants to turn St Joseph’s care home on Cotham Hill, which closed in 2025, into 132 student flats due to what it has described as an ‘acute shortage’ of PBSAs in Bristol.
Ant Draper, from the Cotham Hill Community Group, rejected the assertion Bristol was lacking accommodation.
“Bristol used to be a City with a University, it’s now a University with a City attached,” he said.
“The council claims to prioritise inclusivity and balanced communities with an emphasis on being age-friendly. This proposal discriminates against everyone who is not a student.
“This development is in the heart of a residential area which already houses the highest proportion of students at 37.5%. The addition of 132 more will make the imbalance far worse.”
Bristol City Council has yet to make a decision on whether to approve Harringay’s proposal to change St Joseph’s into student flats. Before it closed, the care home was run by Catholic organisation the Little Sisters of the Poor for 156 years.
Bosses at commercial real estate firm CBRE recently claimed there was an ‘estimated unmet demand’ of more than 31,700 students who could be looking for PBSA spaces in Bristol, with the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England continually expanding. The former is set to welcome up to 4,600 students and 360 staff to its new £500m Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus in September.
A large number of developments under construction or going through the approval process in Bristol, such as the one on the site of the old Haymarket Holiday Inn which is to become the city’s tallest building, are dominated by student flats.
“The St Joseph’s site is exactly the kind of sustainable, discrete and well-located site where this should be addressed,” a spokesperson for Harringay Real Estate said. “It sits within a short walk of the University of Bristol’s main campus in Clifton, with direct access to amenities, shops and public transport, in an area where demand from students is already highest.
“If accommodation is not delivered in locations like this, students will not disappear—they will simply be pushed into surrounding residential streets, increasing pressure on family housing and intensifying HMO (House in Multiple Occupancy) concentrations. Concerns relating to this type of unmanaged HMO accommodation was also a prominent theme raised by local residents in our pre-application consultation.”
Harringay Real Estate was only registered as a company in December and does not have a website. It is based in Taunton and has two directors, Katharine Hanson and Edward Khodabandehloo.
Bristol City Council received the application to change the use of St Joseph’s on April 30. At the time of writing, the application had 59 objections (although one of these was mistakenly labelled as a message of support on the council’s planning portal) with just one public comment in support of the proposal.
Away from students, the rest of the city continues to be at the sharp end of a housing crisis, with rent and property prices among the most expensive in the country. Over 18,000 people remain on the waiting list for social housing despite the council recently culling about 4,000 individuals who hadn’t applied for a home in at least two years from the list.
The CHCG would like the building to be turned into mixed-use housing.
“Bristol claims to be a creative city (so) be creative and create a much-needed multi generational development,” Mr Draper said. “Our message to the developer: Don’t just go for the quick and easy money, do something worthwhile which contributes to our community.
“I strongly object to this proposal because Cotham and Clifton Down are already very very unbalanced communities where up to 37.5% of the population are students which has considerable knock on effects to transport (and to) services like hospitals, police and waste collection.”
Public consultation on the proposed changes to the St Josephs site runs until June 10.