P.P.S. has experience of promoting mixed use and residential sites for a variety of new planning uses in the Local Plan process. As a Local Planning Authority reviews it Plan and introduces new core strategies, there are opportunities within the strategy and also in the documents which accompany them, namely an Allocations Development Plan, to promote a variety of sites, either with previous planning permission or no consent, into a Plan process, to be considered and allocated for new uses.
The main uses that P.P.S. has concentrated upon have been new residential uses on land adjoining existing settlement boundaries and particular examples are Mitcheldean in the Forest of Dean 64 new homes on a previous Green Field site and 48 homes in Drybrook in Gloucestershire on a former builders’ yard within the village centre.
The major project, however, that the practice was involved in related to the redundant Stowfield Works at Lydbrook, Gloucestershire, which comprised of 13 hectares of previously used industrial land for a variety of heavy and other engineering purposes and a third of a million square feet of redundant and not easily converted buildings. Over a period of eight years, P.P.S. promoted the site through Forest of Dean District Council’s Local Plan process and achieved, in their Allocations Plan Document, a variety of uses which are shown in an extract from that Plan.
Long-term site promotion is an exhausting and expensive operation, nevertheless pays dividends. The Stowfield site was additionally in the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty; it had several nomenclatures from English Nature, and a Habitat, Contamination and specifically a variety of Flood Risk modelling was required due to its proximity to the River Wye and potential flood risk. Nevertheless, it is a textbook example of how long-term land promotion can lead to a variety of initial new uses which will continue throughout the planning period of the Local Development Plan.