Lloyds Avenue: Approved, funded...still waiting
Ipswich Borough Council first proposed redeveloping Lloyds Avenue in December 2020. Nearly six years on, and five years after securing funding, it still cannot say when work will begin.
Walk under Lloyd's Arch today, and little has changed since the council first revealed its plans to improve it. In fact, the only thing that has changed is the goalposts.
It is a familiar occurrence in Ipswich, where regeneration promises have repeatedly taken longer, and delivered less, than residents were told to expect.
Six years, no spades in the ground
The story of the Lloyds Avenue redevelopment did not begin in 2024 when designs were revealed. It was named alongside Arras Square and Majors Corner in the Ipswich Investment Plan submitted to government by the Ipswich Town Deal Board in December 2020.
That bid, seeking nearly £29m across 12 projects, included a shared £3m public realm improvements project covering all three sites, with £1.5m requested from the Towns Fund and a further £1.5m committed by the council itself, conditional on that Towns Fund money being secured. Ipswich was awarded its Towns Fund allocation in 2021.
The council did not unveil concept designs specifically for the Lloyds Avenue scheme until July 2024. They ran a public consultation between Thursday, 5 September and Sunday, 29 September 2024. The scheme – now costed at £1.4m, and covering wider footways, new planters and landscaping, alongside a refurbished Lloyds Arch with digital screens and improved lighting – was approved by the Planning and Development Committee on Wednesday, 2 April 2025.
The scheme did not pass without opposition – a small group of taxi drivers and disability campaigners warned that halving the rank from 21 to 11 spaces would leave elderly and disabled passengers struggling – but pass it did.
Construction was expected to begin late 2025, then at the beginning of 2026, but was delayed after issues were found with the substrate beneath the footpaths.
So when will work actually start?
The council says Suffolk Highways has now approved the scheme, allowing a contractor to fix its design and price and book road space to confirm start and finish dates. Once a start date is confirmed, works are expected to take around eight months.
The council also says the Traffic Regulation Order needed to formally implement the taxi rank changes will not be finalised until after the works are complete, meaning the argument that dominated 2025 will still not be settled when building work eventually begins.
The council has now had the funding to deliver this scheme for more than five years, yet it still cannot say when work will begin.
A pattern of underachievement
Lloyds Avenue has waited longer than most other stalled regeneration projects in Ipswich, but it is not an isolated case.
The council's Town Centre Greening project – originally the Ipswich Oasis scheme, first put forward in the December 2020 Towns Fund bid and promised as a "trailblazing" 5km green corridor with living walls and an "active mile" of exercise equipment – had, by August 2025, delivered little more than hanging baskets and some temporary planters near the Cardinal Wolsey statue. Underground utility problems on Princes Street and St Nicholas Street forced repeated design changes. Work on a scaled-back version finally began in February 2026, and while the planters we see today are a welcome improvement, they stop way short of what was originally envisioned.
The redevelopment of Arras Square, another project included in the Towns Fund vision, was first proposed in 2020, when the council appointed Erect Architecture to design the revamp. Following a delay and a public vote, the planning application for the redevelopment was submitted in May 2023. After several setbacks and costly design adjustments, work finally began in June 2026.
Ipswich Museum, meanwhile, has been closed since October 2022. Its reopening has slipped from 2025 to the end of 2026, and now to the first quarter of 2027, with costs rising from an original £8.7m to almost £12.4m after "unexpected challenges".
Oliver Rouane-Williams
The museum absorbed its setbacks through extra funding, spending its way to a finish line that keeps moving. Ipswich Oasis quietly shrank from a five-kilometre green corridor to a handful of planters and benches. Arras Square wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds going through multiple design and planning cycles before work finally began.
Lloyds Avenue, with funding secured over five years ago, is simply waiting. Whether that reflects ambition that outran planning, or planning that never quite caught up with ambition, the council is still unable to answer one simple question: when will work begin?
The bottom line
Lloyds Avenue has been funded since 2021 and approved since April 2025. Despite that, the council can't say when work will actually start. Other regeneration promises across town have faced similar delays, but none have waited quite this long with so little to show for it.
Ipswich Borough Council is to be abolished in 2028, and the redevelopment of Lloyds Avenue – funded and approved – faces the real possibility of outlasting the council that promised it some five years ago.
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