Assessment of Horsell Village Centre

March 25, 2010 — simonashall

Let's keep the development in the town centre and out of Horsell

I attended a meeting tonight on behalf of Horsell Residents Association at Woking Borough Council about carrying out Character Assessments for the Local Development Framework Core Strategy. What this means is that I will be filling in survey details – quite a few of them, actually – about an area in order to provide the council with information it can use when putting together future planning policy.

The area I have chosen is an important one – Horsell High Street between the village school (where Church Hill ends) to the junction with Bullbeggars. This obviously includes the pubs, the village hall and all the shops and so getting the information right is going to take a little while. Among the questions on the survey are positives and negatives about this area and this doesn’t just include planning and built environment issues. I know that we need better parking arrangements in the village centre both to allow people easier access to our shops and make the pavements and roads in the village safer for other cars and pedestrians.

But if there is any other feedback on the character of this area of Horsell that anyone would like to raise, please let me know either by commenting here or emailing me.

In addition, I think that Horsell could benefit from some more surveys being done by residents in conjunction with Horsell Residents Association, particularly in areas of urban heritage value. The whole process should take around three or four hours in most instances, depending on the size of area. All the areas not completed by HRA or residents will be done by the council – they won’t be done badly, but it would be nice to have some control over the information that goes back to the council in the areas of Horsell that we care about most.

So if anyone else would like to do a survey, please get in touch with HRA or Woking Borough Council’s planning department.

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Carthouse Lane Allotments part II

January 22, 2010 — admin

I did say that I would return to the subject of the Carthouse Lane Allotments, although the target date for this application is not until the middle of February. It won’t be heard at the planning meeting on Tuesday – the agenda for that is now published.

Horsell Residents Association met on Wednesday evening and briefly discussed the application. There were concerns about how allotments and warehouses could be built in close proximity to the Special Protection Area when homes themselves were restricted. This all stems to a useless EU directive that is designed to protect nightjars and Dartford Warblers in southern Spain but has wrecked the housing plans of local authorities throughout the Thames Valley.

Put simply, people keep pets and walk them near where they live. It is those dogs and cats that cause a potential hazard to the habitat of ground-nesting birds and the birds themselves. By comparison, a warehouse or industrial unit creates no similar threat. It’s a completely ridiculous directive but there we go.

The general consensus at HRA was that the application itself is no bad thing, even if it did highlight the silliness of the EU law.

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Allotments in Carthouse Lane

January 15, 2010 — admin

Sorry for not blogging more, I’ve come down with a heavy cold over the last couple of days and haven’t felt like doing much.

I will blog on it more at a later point but a planning application for light industrial units and warehouses on the Carthouse Lane site, as well as 80 new allotments, has been put in by Rutland Homes. We are assured that these will be in addition to and not instead of the current Horsell Allotments.

I need to declare a personal interest here – as someone on the waiting list for Horsell Allotments, I stand to gain getting an allotment several years earlier than expected if the application is granted and the scheme goes ahead. But setting that aside, I don’t have a problem with the warehouses given what’s already there – and think it would be difficult to stop them through the planning system anyway.

However, I’d be interested to hear from anyone living in the lane if they have any objections. The application can be viewed on the Woking Borough Council website at the Public Access for Planning application. Under application search, enter PLAN/2009/1091. Objections need to be in by January 21 – Horsell Residents Association is aware.

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Lane excuses

November 25, 2009 — admin

The meeting of the executive on Thursday will consider a report on residential mitigation sites for the Hoe Valley Scheme. This is necessary because the Hoe Valley Scheme projections at the moment show a loss and therefore other sites that the council can develop – or sell for development – need to be considered in order to recoup some of this cost.

Among the sites identified is Blackness Lane, which was subject to a similar situation and council consultation in 2003/4. I understand the objections to building so close to the park but the former greenhouses that were on the site were part of the park’s operation and have never been green open space.

There is the issue of traffic along Blackness Lane but I don’t think the proposals will fashion a great number of new homes. It would be good to see that problem addressed though, particularly because of the risks already taken by those turning right into Claremont Avenue from Guildford Road.

The Blackness Lane site is long overdue being developed. There is currently no best value being gained from the asset. I know that the surrounding area has been developed significantly already – I used to live in Claremont Avenue – but the area on the south side of the town centre has got to bare the burden of the superior transport links it enjoys. There is further development on Constitution Hill and the south entrance into the town that needs to be achieved and I hope that is reflected in the Local Development Framework.

The Blackness Lane site is derelict, overgrown and isolated from the park. No-one wants development in their back yard but if Danesfield can take seven townhouses just down the road from me, so can it. In any case, financial realities leave little room for choice – if holding onto dormant assets was an option, it should be no longer.

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Common sense at last?

November 12, 2009 — admin
Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

I’ve never quite understood why a possible site for one of Surrey’s two required energy-from-waste plants was smack bang in the middle of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Horsell Common is a precious resource – a haven for wildlife and rare plants, a respite from the bustling town life all around, a place for walking dogs and riding horses and somewhere of cultural importance to Woking being identified so clearly in HG Wells’s War of The Worlds. It stretches much farther than the width of Shores Road and cuts across the majority of the west and east Horsell areas. It is generally undervalued within Woking but has a number of staunch supporters who are dedicated to protecting it and its natural beauty and preserving it for others to enjoy.

What it is not is the correct place to site a large industrial building for generating power. It is not a place where large vehicles can enter and exit easily and it should be protected from the noise, odours and detritus of medium-scale industrial activity. To me, this is plainly obvious; but two sets of local authority officers have worked in such a way as to make exactly such an industrial eyesore a realistic possibility. Thankfully, it now looks unlikely.

Horsell Common Preservation Society has successfully argued to overturn a Woking Borough Council planning decision against a change of use for the site to include small-scale industrial and storage buildings. The borough council refused the application on the basis that the Surrey Waste Plan had set aside the site as a possible location for one of its two energy-from-waste plants. But the inspector decided there were compelling reasons – not least of them concerning HCPS’s control over access to the site – that meant Heather Farm was unlikely to be viable prospect as a EFW location and he granted the original application.

His report is pretty clear and it won’t make for comforting reading at county hall. But it should do in Horsell; if a buyer can be found to take on the operation of the site, we should have seen off the bizarre prospect of a waste plant on the doorstep of one of the county’s most environmentally sensitive areas.

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Consultation on the LDF

November 9, 2009 — admin

The consultation questionnaire for the new Core Strategy of Woking Borough Council’s Local Development Framework is now available to be filled in. It’s a fair attempt at a consultation online, although necessarily some of the questions invite certain answers and others have limited options to choose from, which may or may not represent your point of view.

Probably the most contentious point will be the housing allocation options, which give three alternatives. Option A entails a small amount of development in Woking Town Centre but almost a third of new houses being provided from infilling. I don’t think many people in Horsell will welcome this approach as infilling is the quickest and surest way to ruin a streetscene – creating ugly new entrances and packing houses together tightly.

Option C would mean a small urban extension ie Green Belt release to provide new homes. While there is merit in considering this, we simply don’t have to do it – there is plenty of land available in Woking to provide the houses that we need. So having eliminated those two options, the only one left is option B, which concentrates development on the town centre, gives less infill and keeps the Moor Lane and Brookwood Farm developments on the agenda (as do all options). It’s not perfect but I’m sure it will be the preferred route.

There is also a question about protection of areas of character at the expense of other areas. With the LDF comes the abolition of Urban Areas of Special Residential Character, which in Horsell included The Ridgeway, Heath Road, Castle Road and our end of Grange Road. We need to ensure that we still have ways of protecting areas of special character – the old rules used to state that nothing in a UASRC could be built that did not materially improve on what was already there and it was a useful stick to wave at developers.

For the record, now that Danesfield has been developed and so too Robert Beldam’s old house next door to us, I don’t think Grange Road quite cuts it anymore on the “must keep” list. I’d prefer to see Manor Road and Waldens Park Road in Horsell West on the list instead.

I’d encourage anyone with views on the subject to get involved and have your say; these decisions will be affecting people across Woking long after most of us have forgotten about the consultation.

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Planning for Horsell’s future

October 13, 2009 — admin
Development at Danesfield

Development at Danesfield

When I was at the News and Mail I was the only reporter in the entire newspaper group that enjoyed planning meetings. Well, enjoyed is not quite the word – I was intrigued at how such a simple thing ie building a house was made so immensely complicated, weighed so heavily in favour of developers and inspired such high passions among protagonists.

There is a whole different blog to be had on the ins and outs of planning law but on Thursday, Woking Borough Council’s executive will make a decision on whether to process to consultation with the current Core Strategy for the Local Development Framework - the document on which all planning decisions in the future will be based.

There was nothing really wrong with the old system – the Borough Plan – but that didn’t keep enough people employed so the government has decided to change the system to make it twice as big and complex. There are a great many issues that come from the draft document, most of them hidden away so that very few people will notice.

To my mind, two in particular are important for Horsell – the loss of the Urban Areas of Special Residential Character (UASRC) and the increase in minimum density.

I have lived in two flats in Woking – one on Claremont Avenue and another on Horsell Rise – that were both the result of the dreaded development. Therefore, I don’t really have as much of an issue with it as some. But I do think we must protect areas of particular interest and quality from development. Such areas might include the Edwardian charm of Walden’s Park Road and Manor Road in the west and the tree-lined maturity of Wheatsheaf Close and Orchard Drive in the east.

Under the old UASRC system, whatever replaced a house had to be of equal or better quality in the minds of officers to be approved. This wasn’t a bar to development but at least it presented a benchmark – no longer.

In addition, the current average population density in Woking is 14.4 people per hectare. Bearing in mind that 60% of the borough is green belt, the new housing density laid down by government is at least 30 dwellings per hectare (but preferably more). If we assume that most people live in the 40% that isn’t green belt and say that around 30-35 people per hectare live in land open for development, that’s pretty much one house for every person. Eh?

It’s only a draft and there is detailed policy still to formulate. But there is a risk that in the rush to meet targets areas in Horsell that previously considered themselves outside the reach of developers could become less so.

My personal view is that dogmatic refusal to countenance development detracts from the real fight to preserve the character of prized areas. But preserve it we certainly must.

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