Dundee to turn empty floors above Murraygate shops into 120 flats
Council and housing association plan for the upper storeys of the city centre after vacancy rate reaches 28%, the highest of any Scottish city
Dundee is to convert the vacant upper floors of its main shopping streets into 120 flats under a £26m plan that the city council and a housing association say is the only realistic way to bring people back to a centre that has lost a department store, a bank and 40 smaller shops in five years.
The scheme, approved by the council’s planning committee on Monday, covers 23 buildings on the Murraygate, Reform Street and the Wellgate. Most are Victorian, three or four storeys high, and have had nothing above the shop for a generation. Discovery Housing Association, the housing association leading the project, will take 99-year leases from the private owners, who in return will have their roofs and stonework repaired.
Dundee’s city centre vacancy rate was 28% in the spring, according to the Scottish Retail Consortium, the highest of the seven cities and nearly double the Scottish average of 15%. The Overgate shopping centre, bought by the council in 2024, has filled some of its gaps, but the open streets to the east have not recovered from the closure of the city’s last department store in 2022.
“The shops are not coming back in the numbers that built these streets,” said Stuart Kerr, the council’s convener of housing. “What we can do is put 300 people above them who will use the cafes, the chemist and the bus. Edinburgh and Glasgow have people living in their centres as a matter of course. Dundee stopped doing it in the 1960s and we are paying for that now.”
The flats will be a mix of one and two bedrooms, with 70% let at mid-market rents of about £620 a month and the rest at social rents. The first 30, in a former bank on Reform Street, are due to be ready in the spring of 2028. Discovery’s development director, Suzanne Reid, said the hardest part was not the building work but tracing owners. “Some of these upper floors have not been entered since the 1980s,” she said. “We have found one with the ceiling of a ballroom still intact and another with a tree growing through the floor.”
The Scottish government is contributing £11m through its affordable housing programme and the council £4m from its city centre fund. The remainder is borrowed by Discovery against rental income.
Traders on the Murraygate broadly welcomed the plan while asking for the scaffolding to be managed. Ian Petrie, who has run a jewellery shop on the street since 1991, said: “I have watched the floors above me sit empty for 30 years. If it means three years of dust and then customers who live upstairs, I will take that.”
A second phase, covering the Nethergate and the streets around the Howff burial ground, could add a further 80 homes by 2031.
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