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by lizgreen on 12 April, 2015
The planning application for flats on the former Dairy Crest Site on the corner of Lower Marsh Lane and Villiers Avenue has finally been submitted to Kingston Council.
The brief description is “Demolition and redevelopment of the existing site. Erection of five residential blocks ranging up to five storeys in height. Comprising of 83 units, two retail units at ground, car and cycle parking at ground and basement level and associated landscaping.”
The full plans can be viewed on the Council website and comments need to be received by the Council by 1st May 2015.
2 Comments
For those of you who think you might be in favour of this development, please spare a thought for those of us who will be living next to it.
My neighbour’s boundary is going to be less than 7.5m from a building which is up to 15.5m tall (just over 50 feet) and around 45m long (around 150feet). A conservative estimate of the surface area is in excess of 560 square metres.(or 6050 square feet).
We will lose all the afternoon light and any privacy, as our road will be overlooked by over 50 windows, which the developer admits are large to allow light to flood into the new flats.
The estimate density of this development is 143 units per hectare (86 flats on this site). The council’s own suggested limit is 33 per hectare (20 houses for this site). This density is not for the good of the local community – either the current residents or the new residents – it is just greed.
If you think this doesn’t affect you, it might not… now. However, the developer is citing other tall buildings in the area to show how this is reasonable. When this monster building is built, it will be an undeniable precedent for future buildings in a suburban setting like ours which, at the moment, are predominantly 2 stories with gaps between buildings.
There are so many other ways this valuable (and I don’t mean money) land could be used in a way to support and sustain our local area.
Please look at the plans and consider how inappropriate this particular building is in this setting. Try to remember that this building has other sides, it isn’t just about tidying up the corner of Villiers Avenue and Lower Marsh Lane.
Those of us who live in Villiers Close don’t recognise the description of the area provided by the developers. If you could see how our road used to look before these people took a chainsaw and a bulldozer to it, you would have been amazed.
We do not require or want to be “improved” in this way.
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