Astry Close Community Led Housing: Planning Permission Granted!
Last week we (finally) received the Planning Approval for the Community led housing project we co-designed with residents of Lawrence Weston. Our clients, Ambition Lawrence Weston, and Brighter Places Housing Association are two amazing partners, committed to enacting positive social and environmental change. They recognise access to a desirable, affordable, sustainable home as central to this, and after some 8 years working towards this goal, ALW have achieved their first consent for a housing project in the area of their own making. The journey to get here has involved the development of a Neighbourhood Development Plan; allocating sites for development that they wanted to bring forward, and a thorough community led design process from inception to create the brief, develop ideas, and appoint architects to work with to co-design and develop the proposals.
We worked closely with residents and ALW to develop the initial ideas brought to us by the group; we respected these, and sought to evolve rather than change them. The final proposal was remarkably consistent with their initial document, with changes to deal with the density and complex levels of the site. In spite of the overwhelming community and local stakeholder support for the project, the Local Planning Authority struggled to accept some aspects of the design. After an extended period of negotiation, design testing and exploration, the project was eventually determined by the Planning Committee. This meant that the local City ward councillors ‘called it in’ - requesting that the application be determined by the Committee, rather than at a Planning Case officer level.
We had strongly supported and encourage this approach, and our experience of other comparable projects is that this can be the best way to apply common sense to determine an application. Our case was clear; the group who had written the Neighbourhood Plan, and designed the project attested that it was in accordance with their own policies, and it had 42 letters of support, and 0 objections! The LPA disagreed. The Committee Unanimously Approved the project, and now many months later, we have the Permission. You can watch the committee decision from 1hr 18mins into the YouTube video link below.
The project has 44 Planning Conditions to address, and we are in the process of developing tender information for the project to enable it to be constructed. We’re looking at different options for the construction to minimise embodied carbon, and retain the high levels of design ambition in respect of materials, quality, and public realm.
