Four of the 22 disabled bays at the Oxford Street car park are going for good to make room for electric vehicle chargers, and half of them will still be out of use when it reopens on Friday.
Swansea Council says the top part of the car park reopens on Friday with 11 disabled bays. The full car park, with 18 disabled bays and four new charging bays, will not be open until the week beginning 9 November.
The car park has 62 spaces in all and sits beside the Grand Theatre; the council recommends it for the Grand, Swansea Market and the city centre shops. Blue Badge holders pay to park there, at a reduced rate.
Closed since Monday to finish the chargers
The council announced the closure on Facebook, saying the car park would shut from Monday to Thursday so contractors could continue installing Ultra Rapid EV charging points in the lower section. Most of the work, it said, had been done without a full closure.
Drivers were pointed to the Quadrant multi-storey or Paxton Street in the meantime. Theatre-goers with mobility problems replied that both were too far for an evening visit, and that Oxford Street was the one car park they could manage from.
Ultra rapid chargers are the fastest type on the public network, able to put a useful amount of range into a car that can take the power in the time it takes to buy a coffee. Who will run the four at Oxford Street and what drivers will pay has not been announced.
Disabled bays made way for the chargers, users say
Several people replying to the council’s post said the spaces given over to the chargers were disabled bays. Replying to one of them, the council said 18 would remain.
Swansea Council was asked on Wednesday why disabled bays were the ones given over, and about the future of the site, and had not answered by noon on Thursday.
The one-acre site on the council’s redevelopment list
There is a longer question over the car park itself. The council’s Shaping Swansea pages list seven sites to be redeveloped in phases over the next two decades, and one of them is “a one-acre Oxford Street site that currently accommodates a small car park”.
The programme is the council’s partnership with developer Urban Splash, whose sketchbook for the city in December 2024 described the site simply as “Oxford Street, a mixed-use city centre site”. It sat alongside the Civic Centre, St Thomas, the Hafod Copperworks, the land by the Sailbridge, Swansea Central and the Promenade.
The sites that have moved since are the three the council and Urban Splash named first. The Civic Centre plans went in to planners in August.
The St Thomas railway land is now proposed for 124 homes. Oxford Street has not had a mention since.
It did not appear in the draft city centre plan councillors saw last December. Nor was it in the Future Swansea plan the council put out to consultation in February.
Shaping Swansea says the seven schemes will “start, progress and finish at different times”, and nothing published so far puts a date on Oxford Street. For now the only plan on the table is the chargers.
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