“A remarkable opportunity,” is how architect Richard Rogers described his £725m vision to design an entirely new gateway to Cambridge. Twelve years on, the result has been called “rubbish”, “unfit” and “soulless” by local residents, not to mention being accused of “designing in crime”, after a rise in antisocial behaviour and a wave of “pop-up brothels”.

Visitors arriving by train are now greeted with a generic clone-town scene more like a suburban retail park than an illustrious seat of learning. Reconstituted stone fins line the front of a broad, bland office building, presenting a beige frontage of Pret, Costa and Wasabi outlets to the new station square. The insipid facade of a squat Ibis hotel frames its other side, looking on to a public space seemingly designed more with cars than people in mind. For somewhere that markets itself as “the best small city in the world”, it is a disappointing welcome.

“It’s such a wasted opportunity,” says local resident and community activist Sam Davies. “We were promised a world-class development and a wonderful new public piazza, but we’ve ended up with identikit blocks set around a choked taxi rank. It’s an embarrassment to the city.”

A long slab of student flats stretches to the south along the railway line, next to a row of four brick apartment blocks looking on to a small lawn, which has been fenced off for the last two years, following a spate of problems. As the only open space provided for the joint use of the 1,000 student apartments and 350 homes – many occupied by young families – it became a contested spot, a single patch of grass catering to small children and student football matches, a place of late-night music and, according to a council report, dope-smoking until the early hours.

Choked with taxis … Station Square. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian

“The park has been a disaster,” says Frank Gawthrop, chair of a local residents’ association. “The problems could have been predicted from the beginning – it’s a tiny area for a new neighbourhood of this size. And now the developer has the cheek to ask the council to pay to fix the problems they created.”

Brookgate, the company behind the CB1 development, recently applied for £150,000 from the council to “help to mitigate additional impacts of development not previously envisaged”. The request was swifty rejected, but Brookgate says it still expects the council to pay to “compartmentalise” the park. “I think we’ve provided enough space, but it’s simply been too popular,” says Brookgate CEO Sven Töpel, denying that the antisocial behaviour issues are a result of the design. “It’s early days and the community is still settling down. Every project has its teething problems, but the vitality and life created should be seen as a positive force.”

It’s not quite so positive in the eyes of the Cambridgeshire police, called to the development “a disproportionate number of times”, not only to patrol late-night student antics, but to investigate the trafficking of sex workers. “We’ve seen an awful lot of ‘pop-up brothels’,” says Detective Inspector Nick Skipworth, who recently asked the council for extra resources to police the area.

“A huge number of the properties are available as short-term holiday lets for a week at a time, so they’ve been targeted by the sex trade. We’ve been running an operation to safeguard sex workers over the last two years and made several arrests related to trafficking in the CB1 area.”

The litany of complaints goes on. The promised “bus interchange” at the heart of the plan has turned out to be a series of bus stops dotted down a side street. The narrow access road to the station, lined with new apartments on both sides, has led to air quality issues. A planned health clinic, along with a new home for the county’s archive and a heritage visitor centre, have all failed to materialise. “All the public benefits of the project have been progressively eaten away,” says Davies. “The resulting place has the makings of a future slum.”

‘The best small city in the world’ … Cambridge’s Bridge of Sighs. Photograph: Alamy

Töpel insists, however, that the new line of bus stops is more efficient than an interchange, that they are monitoring air quality and that there was no longer a need for the facilities imagined in the original plan.

It is hard to believe how this handsome city’s flagship scheme – masterminded by one of the country’s most feted architects and just a stone’s throw from the Stirling prize-winning Accordia housing development, could have gone quite so wrong. The answers can be found in its chequered history. The project began life in 2004, when local housebuilder Ashwell Property Group appointed the Richard Rogers Partnership to develop an outline plan for a new “business and cultural centre” on a 10-hectare site around the station.

A year later, the plans were unveiled to breathless coverage in the local paper, with a double-page spread featuring the promised bounty of a “proper transport interchange”, affordable housing, healthcare facilities and a new heritage centre, which was planned to be housed in a majestic old grain silo next to the station. “This is just the sort of infrastructure development we need so desperately,” said its editorial. “Having an architect of the calibre of Lord Rogers on board is a real plus.”

Despite the stardust, the plan got off to a bumpy start. Rogers’ first outline planning application was refused in 2006, criticised by design watchdog Cabe for being out of scale with the area and dismissed by the council’s planning committee as “singularly unimaginative”. It was resubmitted in 2008, with minor alterations, and approved after a tortuous 11-hour committee meeting.

The following year, Ashwell went into administration, having overstretched its reach during the boom and breached the terms of its debt with Lloyds. The “pre-pack” nature of the administration allowed two directors, Sven Töpel and Jon Wooles, to form a new, debt-free company, Brookgate Limited, and buy back Ashwell’s profitable assets, including the Cambridge scheme. As local blogger Richard Taylor noted: “Both members of the public and councillors expressed concern at this scurrilous, albeit legal, behaviour.” Töpel says the restructuring was necessary “to put us on a strong footing to deliver the scheme”.

‘More like a generic clone-town than an illustrious seat of learning’ … one of the office blocks in the development. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian

From then on, the quality of the project was progressively watered down and obligations renegotiated, each regressive step argued on the basis of the straitened economic climate in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. With outline permission achieved, Rogers’ practice was ditched in favour of a team of uninspiring commercial firms, including Chetwoods, TP Bennett and Perkins & Will, to bring forward detailed applications for the individual plots. Töpel says it was because he was keen to use architects he had worked with before.

To give you some idea of the pedigree of one of these architects, the Perkins & Will team is headed by John Drew, former director of Rafael Viñoly architects, who worked on the design of London’s Walkie-Talkie skyscraper, winner of the Carbuncle Cup for worst building of 2015, and the masterplan to strangle Battersea Power Station with a noose of luxury flats. He has brought the same inimitable touch to Cambridge with One Station Square, the bulky deep-plan office block that faces the station.

This unpromising scenario was then exacerbated by further hurdles. The romanesque grain silo, slated for the heritage centre, burned down in 2010, and with it hopes for a cultural facility. Its plot will now be filled with a lozenge-shaped tower of luxury flats, designed by Formation, the same architects of the Ibis hotel. These extra residences mean the percentage of affordable housing in the overall project will drop from 40% to just 30% – a change agreed by the council.

The same year, Brookgate applied to demolish a Victorian terrace along the main station approach road, to make way for a line of bulky office buildings currently under construction. The plan was met with fierce public opposition, prompting 500 objections, and the council accordingly refused permission – only for Brookgate to win on appeal, landing the city with up to £300,000 in legal costs.

The council has been wary of standing in the developer’s way ever since. “The city council is running scared,” says Davies. “They know the market has the upper hand. The weakness of the planning system means they genuinely don’t have the tools to get a better deal for the city.”

Traffic choked … the narrow access road to the station has raised concerns over air quality. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian

John Preston was conservation officer at the council from 2004 to 2011. “It was an uphill battle from the beginning,” he says. “Given the drastic shortage of staff in local authorities these days, it makes it very difficult to follow up on the consent and enforce the design quality of what is built. What you see now is clearly nowhere near the ambition or quality we were promised.”

Sitting out on his terrace on a sunny May afternoon, overlooking the fenced-off public lawn, one elderly resident is resigned to how his new home has turned out. “We’re getting used to it and there haven’t been so many noise issues since they closed off the park,” he says. “But the whole place is driven by one thing. If it’s a question between amenities and profit, profit clearly wins.”

Brookgate reported £10m in pre-tax profits last year, but it has no plans to provide a health clinic, heritage centre or enhanced transport interchange in CB1. Töpel is adamant that the project is “as close as possible to the original vision” and he promises things will improve once the other side of the square is complete, insisting that the taxi rank is “only 60%” of the piazza. But the CGI images provide little grounds for optimism. The final phases will see more of the same off-the-peg developer filler, clad in the default anywhere costume of cheap brick and pre-cast stone fins.

Andrew Morris, who led the Rogers masterplan and was expecting his practice to design some of the buildings in detail, says the layout is loosely as he envisaged, but that certain key elements haven’t materialised. “You can only do so much with a masterplan,” he adds. “Ultimately, you’ve got to rely on the quality and imagination of the individual architects to interpret the constraints that have been imposed.”

For the Cambridge residents who have been subjected to broken promises for the last decade, the whole saga represents a painful missed opportunity. “We were all taken in by the name Richard Rogers,” says Allan Brigham, a long-standing local historian and Blue Badge guide. “But now it seems they were just using his name as a fig leaf. This was a chance to make a gateway to the city that we could all be proud of. But they’ve blown it.”

• This article was amended on 11 July 2017. An earlier version mistakenly said a road to the station had breached EU air quality guidelines. This has been changed to say concerns over air quality have been raised.