Development Control Committee - TrustNews Summer 1998
Marks & Spencer Warehouse
Decisions have now been made on several schemes about which the Trust felt strongly. As reported in the last Newsletter we had objected to those for the Chantry Mead Hotel, Bereweeke Road, and the Old Market House, High Street, and we are glad to say that permission for both applications has been refused.
A more recent scheme was the proposal to build four new retail units on the site of the present Winchester Post Office. While the actual proposal was acceptable in general terms, we felt it was premature to take a decision before it was known what was going to happen on a sizable plot of nearby land, and we had objected to this scheme. The future of the Marks & Spencer warehouse and the adjoining Bus Station has been under discussion for some months and has still to be decided. However, it seems likely that whatever is eventually built on these sites there could be a pedestrian link through them from the Bus Station to the Brook Centre area via Tanner Street and Silver Hill. The proposed Post Office scheme has been designed without consideration of this possibility, and gaping caverns for service vehicles similar to those existing would face onto Tanner Street and this stretch of the approach to the Brooks Centre area would be rather dreary as a result. Despite being asked to defer the application until the future use of the two sites had been decided, at the beginning of the year the property developers pressed ahead, and their application was granted with what seemed almost indecent haste compared with other instances when months of haggling and negotiations take place.
Winchester Bus Station
This has certainly been the case with schemes for what is now known as the Queen's Court Block on the upper level of Peninsula Barracks. Here the proposed building has been under discussion since the end of 1996, when proposals for the Black Tower (same site, different building) first saw the light of day. The contemporary design proposed in October last year for the present Queen's Court Block was not found upsetting by the Trust, but has caused considerable ire on the part of some Peninsula Barracks residents. Its size has however been found unacceptable by everybody, including the Planning Committee, who in April deferred the application for further negotiations about its size, landscaping and relationship to neighbouring buildings - the Mons Block in particular would have suffered considerable overshadowing from the proposed structure - and further details on a variety of aspects are also being sought.
This is an important and sensitive site, and it is very appropriate that as much time as is necessary should be given to the process of reaching the correct solution for this location. The Trust very much hopes this will also be the case with the proposals for Morn Hill and that as much time as is necessary will be given to reaching the best development for this important and highly visible site. We are however very afraid that this might not in fact happen.
The designers have recently given us a presentation of the current proposals for the development at Morn Hill. This is for an Intech exhibition hall and lecture theatre/ planetarium, workplace buildings and a hundred-bedroom hotel, and there is much to recommend the proposed development. For one thing the unsightly mess fts, of wrecked cars will go, and a site and funding towards the Intech centre will be provided by the developers. The design of the simple pyramid and dome of the Intech structures is exciting and suitably high-tech, and they should most admirably provide the highly visible scheme to mark the Millennium that is desired by the City. There is an environmentally-sensitive approach to the design of the hotel and other buildings, which aims to provide a low energy, high performance, sustainable development that merges into the landscape, and the Trust very much welcomes this forward-looking attitude.
We are however very concerned that so many aspects of the design and siting still remain to be decided. There are computer-generated views of the site as a whole, but it is not possible to get much idea of what the buildings would be like from within the site, for there are no perspectives of the buildings and the drawings of the elevations are not detailed enough to give an adequate impression of their appearance.
Some other aspects are even more worrying, and they raise questions which need to be answered before permission for the development is granted. The most important of these is:
What happens if the Development Group fails to complete or, even worse, start construction of the scheme? There have been few grounds for resisting this present scheme because permission was given in the past for a two-hundred bedroom hotel on part of the site. Fortunately the current proposal is an unusually sensitive scheme that respects its surroundings, but once it has received planning consent, what happens should this consortium fall by the wayside? Permission will have been given for a larger development than before - an exhibition complex, workplace buildings and a hundred bedroom hotel - and what protection will this vulnerable site then have from the depredations of a determined developer intent on building a more intrusive and damaging scheme?
We have therefore urged the City to seek expert advice on this aspect, and have regretfully objected to the scheme as presented in the current application because inadequate details about the proposed development and insufficient protection against possible future disasters have been provided.
The Trust however very much fears that the impetus for an early decision will prevail because the Millennium component of the project will be pushing for the scheme to be virtually completed by the turn of the century. Desirable though this might be in the short term, if too little time is allowed for a full discussion of all the aspects arising from the development, we shall then have to live with the possibly unsatisfactory results of a premature decision for many years to come.