Dartford Borough Council is preparing to launch the contest for a contractor to deliver a £25m town centre housing scheme after submitting a planning application for the long-awaited Westgate Village redevelopment.

The council has lodged plans to transform the derelict former Co-op site between Spital Street and Hythe Street into a new neighbourhood delivering 69 homes across a mix of blocks rising to 4 storeys and town houses.

Around 22,000 sq ft of Class E commercial space will also be delivered alongside the conversion of part of the retained Co-op building into 8,500 sq ft of entertainment space.

Procurement for the main contractor is expected to begin later this month, with tender documents due to be issued on 19 March via the Kent Business Portal.

Construction on the scheme is targeted to start at the end of the year following planning approval and procurement.

The 0.84-hectare site has sat largely empty since the Co-op store closed in 2008 and was partly demolished five years later.

Dartford Borough Council bought the site from Homes England in 2022 and appointed Peter Barber Architects to develop a housing-led regeneration plan after an earlier private-sector scheme collapsed.

The scaled-down project replaces a much larger £75m regeneration scheme approved in 2020 that would have delivered hundreds of homes, a cinema, hotel and leisure uses.

That proposal, led by Muse Developments, was eventually dropped after Brexit and Covid impacts made the scheme unviable.