Lytham Quays II

Site Last Updated

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Update - January 2008:

According to the local Press, the first resident’s have now moved into the much reduced “Lytham Quays” development.

Dock Road, thankfully, remains designated as being for employment uses only, and we trust that our local councillors will ensure that it remains as such in the face of a projected relaxation of the regulations around planning by the Brown administration.

At the DCC meeting of 10th May 2006 Kensington Developments were given approval for the reserved matters on both of these two sites

Defend Lytham have accepted the inevitability of development on these two sites, but objected strongly to the detail contained in the proposals.

Copies of our letters of objection can be found here:

Sadler’s site

Cookson’s site

Kensington are now well into the construction phase on these two sites

We are disappointed that this developer has already demonstrated contempt for current planning legislation by creating an access road to their sales office via Chandlers rest before being granted planning permission. We understand from local residents that this has already caused considerable disturbance and inconvenience.

The Cooksons/Sadlers site already looks nothing like the plans that were passed in May 2006. While the streets seem much narrower than portrayed originally, most striking of all is the absence of virtually all of the open and play spaces promised in the planning application. It appears that the developer is claiming that land outside the consented site boundary – some of which is publicly owned – is more than adequate compensation for this. In short, the aim is to encroach on the foreshore. This must not be tolerated.

Sleight of hand aside, three additional planning applications have now been lodged with Fylde Borough Council for alterations to the consented Cooksons/Sadlers scheme and these are assuredly only the first of many that are in the pipeline. We as a community must resist these if we are not to allow our beloved town to degenerate into little more than a developers’ playground. This we owe not just to ourselves, but also to future generations.

Application 07/1049 is the most threatening of the three and is the one on which we focus here. It is really two applications dressed as one and requests permission for the erection of 24 extra care units, plus manager’s accommodation, and of 15 standard apartments. The first of these is proposed for land that was mostly supposed to form the landscaped entry to the development at the junction of Warton Street and East Beach. If allowed to go ahead, the building will dominate the vista from both of those roads. Not only that, the developer asserts in justification for its application that there is a shortage of such accommodation in Fylde. However, the very same company was granted permission in November 2006 to erect 90 such units as part of its development of the former Aegon site on Ballam Road. To date, not a brick has been laid.

The second part of the proposal is for the construction of a block of 15 apartments to replace two previously consented villas overlooking the river. Such substitutions were one of the principal devices used to expand the overall size of Cypress Point. It may seem fairly innocuous in this case, but please bear two facts in mind. First, the current local plan 2006-2016 identifies the need for just one new dwelling over that period and this application alone is for an additional 34. Second, there are 14 further similarly situated villas on the Cooksons/Sadlers site on which work is yet to start. Surely, we do not want our town to become the northern equivalent of Milton Keynes. What is more, we do not have the infrastructure – education, health services, roads etc. – to cope. The new traffic lights at the Warton Street-East Beach junction will cause chaos even if no-one were to move onto the new development. Just imagine what it will be like if we get somewhere near the additional 2734 dwellings proposed under the original Lytham Quays design statement

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