Cornwall’s Eden Project, which opened its doors in 2001, has become a shining example of British enterprise and architecture, attracting tens of thousands of tourists each year.
So when plans were announced for a sister project in the faded seaside town of Morecambe, in Lancashire, there were high hopes that the £100 million scheme would be ‘transformational’ for the local economy.
But in what has become an all-too-familiar story in Britain, delays in approving Government grants as well as inflation and soaring business costs in the wake of Rachel Reeves’ disastrous 2024 Budget have forced the project to massively scale back its ambitions.
Initial excitement in the town has turned to scepticism about whether the predicted 500,000 annual visitors – and associated economic benefits – will actually materialise.
Its troubles will fuel frustration among business leaders at the UK’s inability to build big projects.
Last week, billionaire diamond mining heir Jonathan Oppenheimer said that Britain’s complex and slow-moving planning system had made the country ‘uninvestable’.
Losing its glow: An artist’s image of Eden Project Morecambe shows it to be half the originally planned size as construction costs have ballooned
Losing its glow: An artist’s image of Eden Project Morecambe shows it to be half the originally planned size as construction costs have ballooned
Eden’s original site near St Austell in Cornwall, which features a ‘global garden’ with rainforests and Mediterranean plants inside giant, climate-controlled ‘biomes’, has attracted millions of visitors and contributed £1.8 billion to the local economy since it opened.
The new site, known as Eden Project Morecambe, was announced in 2019 and received a boost in 2023 when £50 million of Government funding was earmarked for the project.
But this was thrown into doubt last year when Labour put the grant under review following their General Election victory.
It was finally secured in November last year, after a delay that came despite a pledge by then Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who inherited responsibility for the project from Tory Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, that the Government would ‘do everything we can to see what we can do to make that happen’.
The delays also hampered efforts by Eden to secure cash from other backers.
The project has had to drum up another £50 million to get off the ground, including £30 million from Lancashire’s public pension fund, plus loans and sponsorship cash.
While it has now secured all but £2.5 million of the required funds, plans have been scaled back as costs have mounted.
A revised planning application, submitted last month, shows a seafront building including covered gardens with two domes and an internal area of 8,500 sq metres (91,500 sq ft) – far smaller than the planned 17,000 sq metre building with four domes.
The redesign came after the cost of the 2022 proposal soared to £130 million from £100 million.
Eden insists the ‘cost of the project will be paid back many times over in the form of economic benefits’ despite the delays.
But local residents and business owners remain sceptical.
Morecambe-based estate agent James Fletcher said: ‘There’s still going to be something there, which will be an improvement, but compared with the original, I don’t see it as a game-changer.
‘Smaller businesses were very excited but, given the time delay – with nothing happening on site except exploratory work in September – that’s gone and scepticism has replaced it.’
David Morris, the town’s Tory MP between 2010 and 2024, who helped to secure the original £50 million grant, said the Government’s decision to delay funding had ‘hampered’ Eden’s ability to find sponsors.
Caroline Jackson, Green Party leader of Lancaster City Council, which is handling funding for Eden, said the changes were ‘inevitable’ due to higher prices. She added: ‘We’ve had a big rise in construction costs. The changes were inevitable – all projects have to work within the financial situation we are in.’
Eden’s project director John Pye defended the redesign, saying it was now ‘sustainable and deliverable within budget’.
He said: ‘If we were to go blindly into something that was of a scale we couldn’t afford, that’s how too many projects fail.’
Pye added the revisions had to account for stubbornly high inflation, which was running at 3.6 per cent in October, the highest in the G7 group of advanced economies. Aside from ballooning costs, the project is also struggling to get access to the cash it has already been promised.
So far, only £18 million of Government funding has been released, which Pye said was because the project needed to match it with money raised from other backers.
‘It was to be released in phases on the condition we had matching funding in place. That has taken time,’ he said.
Construction is scheduled to begin between May and August next year, with the site expected to open in winter 2028, two and a half years later than first planned.
A Government spokesperson said that there had been ‘positive project progress’ on Eden ‘working towards an opening date in late 2028’.
Lizzi Collinge, Morecambe’s Labour MP, was approached for comment.
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