It is an exciting time to allow Keywest estate agent to help you find your perfect home to live in Leicester, as ambitious plans emerge for the city.

The local authority is on the verge of submitting its plans for the first phase of a planned £26 million regeneration scheme, whilst the winners of an international competition to find the best idea for regenerating Soar Island have been announced.

The £9.5 million first phase of the proposed Waterside regeneration programme will focus on an area between Friars Mills and the Grand Union Canal.

It features the creation of two Friar’s Mill office buildings close to the old Donisthorpe Factory. The latter is currently part of £6.3 million scheme to create business units.

The buildings will provide office space of about 1,000 square metres, which will be offered for sale or rent to raise funds for the bigger regeneration project covering 150 acres of the Waterside that is proposed for the next decade and a half.

Leicester’s mayor, Peter Soulsby, has said that the authority’s vision is to create a thriving Waterside neighbourhood offering excellent accommodation and business space. The scheme will also be sensitive to the bio-diversity, green space and heritage of the area, he added.

Government money from the Local Growth Fund and Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership, totalling about £20 million, has already been ear-marked for the scheme.

Meanwhile, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects (SWA), of London, came top out of 80 designs submitted from across the world in a competition run by Leicester City Council and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

The SWA design focused on the creation of a ‘secret island’ in Leicester’s industrial heartland, an area central to the multi-million pound Waterside regeneration plans, and was inspired by ideas of sustainable communities and low-impact living.

The design features riverside starter homes, narrowboats, craft and micro-farming workshops, open-air space for performances and an intriguing floating swimming pool.

One of the judges, Glen Howells, said that the SWA design stood out from the rest because of the way it integrated architecture, ecology, landscape and heritage with a variety of activities with the potential to draw people on to the island and to the riverside area in general.

A spokesman for SWA, which won an award of £5,000, said that their proposed combination of housing, leisure and working space would create a new quarter for the city, connected but set apart from the rest of the city.

This would be a habitat where humans and wildlife could live together and people could live and work with minimum impact on the environment.

Only time will tell if any aspects of the winning design will feature in the final plans of the developers who take on the project, but the worldwide interest in the competition and, ultimately, in the future of Leicester cannot be denied, with entries being submitted from as far afield as America and Hong Kong.