Work on £3.7m transport hub in Taunton to start after Christmas
New £3.7m Taunton transport hub set to break ground after Christmas, promising smoother travel and revitalised public spaces
Work on Taunton’s new £3.7m transport hub will finally begin after Christmas, Somerset Council has confirmed.
The council has received significant funding from the Department for Transport (DfT) to replace the redundant Tower Street facility (which closed in March 2020) with a new transport hub for buses and coaches, as part of its multi-year bus service improvement plan (BSIP).
The council held an initial consultation in the summer of 2024, with further views being sought from Taunton Town Council in June 2025 about how some of the buildings within the site could be re-purposed for community uses.
Somerset Council has now awarded the contract for the project, paying its chosen bidder £1,946,000 to deliver the bulk of construction on the new hub, which will officially enter service in the late-summer of 2026.
The new hub will include six bus stops, each with their own shelter, which are ‘drive in, drive out’ stops – meaning buses will not have to reverse out onto Tower Street after they have picked up passengers.
Two coach stops will also be provided along Castle Way (near the Mecca Bingo), providing an interchange for passengers between the local bus network and the nationwide coach journeys.
There will be five layover bays, where local buses can be parked when not in active service to prevent them clogging up the town centre, and each of the new shelters will include seating and solar panels on their roofs.
The new hub will have real-time information boards for passengers, an indoor waiting room with toilets, and a changing places toilet facility with a dedicated accessible parking bay.
Outside the building will be a pedestrianised area with outdoor seating and planting, with bicycle parking and new pedestrian crossings to link the site with Goodlands Gardens and other existing active travel routes.
Robert Downes, the council’s regeneration and major projects officer, said in his written report: “The ambition is to open the new transport hub during August 2026, and prior to the annual changes to the autumn and winter bus service timetable, which start in September 2026.
“Our bus services operational plan will consider peak demand periods and how operators will use the bus stops, as well the integration of services with other transport connections.”
The council carried out a feasibility study into the possibility of letting out part of the wider sale for commercial use, such as a café, offices or retail units.
However, officers ultimately decided against including this in the proposals, citing limited funding, “low levels of occupier demand” and “an over-saturation of food and drink providers in Taunton”.
NHS Somerset used the bus station as a vaccination centre during the coronavirus pandemic, relocating its temporary vaccination centre from within the Firepool site in March 2022.
Discussions about the NHS continuing to use part of the site as a “vaccination hub” proved fruitless, since the transport hub would remove much of the car parking needed for the NHS to run such a facility.
Mr Downes added: “Taunton Town Council is now working on plans that would see investment in both buildings, including lifts, the creation of new community spaces on the top floor of building one, rentable office space and new public toilets in building two.
“This approach provides benefits in helping to reduce costs and risk to Somerset Council, but also enables the redevelopment of the entire site and the creation of a transport/ community-related hub with a diverse set of uses.”
The full cost of the project is expected to be £3,762,800, including a contingency of nearly £554,000 to offset any increase in building materials during construction.
More than £310,000 has already been allocated towards “design, management and operational development”, with the main construction due to cost just under £2,900,000.
The project is being entirely funded through central government grants, with £3,462,800 coming from BSIP grants and a further £300,000 from the DfT’s local transport grant.
In a bid to keep costs down, Somerset Council has divided the project into six separate construction tenders, with the main body of construction costing £1,964,000 and five separate contracts intending to handle smaller elements (such as the shelters).
The council has sufficient funding within its BSIP revenue grant to manage the transport hub until March 2029.
After this date – assuming no further central government funding becomes available – these costs will fall on either Somerset Council or Taunton Town Council.