Suitability of BBC regional studios

I guess ITV lease their space in Salford too and although not a studio in the traditional four-waller sense we don't see the complaints about the Granada Reports studio that we do about Breakfast/NWT. That little bit of extra height makes the difference.

Of course too news traditionally may not have come from studios anyway and was often within the newsroom itself, which in most cases is just office space anyway.

If that we understand to be correct is true, breakfast / regional news was never intended to be in the space it is now. There's a ground floor space with loads of ceiling height that was apparently going to be the NWT studio. But then breakfast got shipped up north and that space was deemed unsuitable, so they had to find an alternative in a building that was already well into construction (certainly beyond the point of changing floor plates).

Sport managed to get a decent space for their studio as part of the same project. It's only because of the changing requirements that news lost out (although a good argument for making flexible spaces in case your needs change).

Correct. The NWT studio should have been on the ground floor directly 2 floors under where it is now. It was planned to have windows rather than screens/plasmas.
NWT was supposed to be one of the first departments to move and planning was well underway then breakfast was moved up north.
The plans changed quite a bit..

It seems an odd decision to use converted office space, couldn't they just hire something in Dock10.

That would add additional cost and I'd imagine for a news orientated programme adds complication that both newsrooms would be in a separate building to the programme. I'd feel sorry for sport and business presenters - especially on a busy day.

Cost... dock 10 are expensive.
It’s an in house team. Don’t forget news is probably the only set of programmes where it’s cheaper to have staff rather than freelance, why pay a third party??
Also bear in mind content is far more important than look......apparently...

Hiring from Dock 10 comes with a price tag

I guess the intended ground floor studio space probably got turned into office space then.

It's all about design too - I don't think the Sportcentre has much extra headroom but it looks far far better. The problem the NWT set has is it looked dated pretty much from the moment it launched.

The ground floor is like a floor and a half.. there’s way more headroom, the original studio space is used by tours...

If the ground floor has additional height then perhaps they could use the original space intended for them. They don't have to use the windows if they want to avoid the TLS7 issue Daybreak encountered. IIRC it was a decent sized space, so they could always recycle part of the now disused set from Llandaff.

Not gonna happen...

I'm sure it is a significantly smaller space - perhaps more in line with what regional studios are in size in more recent changes.