Are York’s developers aiming high enough with UK’s largest regeneration project?

An expansion of the National Railway Museum is an important element of the York Central regeneration project. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

On an area the size of 63 football pitches next to York’s Victorian railway station, work is under way on the UK’s biggest city centre regeneration scheme, which will expand the area by a third.

The £2.5bn project, called York Central, aims to transform a vast 45-hectare (111-acre) site – once a major railway manufacturing hub with iron foundries, signalling workshops and wagon stables, now mostly a drab car park – into housing and offices.