Our own visualisation of the proposed village, and not a photograph: this scheme was refused and never built. Fifteen buildings on the 3.5 acres the council would accept, with the remaining 22 acres left open.
The full story
The site is a former nursery and garden centre on the A428 Rugby Road, on the eastern edge of Binley Woods, roughly 1.5 km from Coventry and a field short of Brandon, opposite the city's former speedway stadium. Retail use had begun there in the 1960s and the nursery and garden centre in the 1980s. By the time we were appointed the buildings were derelict and the site had been out of use for over a decade. All 10.4 hectares of it sit in the West Midlands Green Belt.
A land and development company controlled the site and asked us the only question that mattered on ground like that: how much development can this actually support, and how do you get a planning authority to agree to it. Green Belt land is worth what can credibly be built on it. Until that is settled, the acreage is close to meaningless.
We started with the argument rather than a layout. The site was not a blank field: it carried an extant consent, granted in 2015 and not our work, for a replacement garden centre. That consent had established two things worth more than any drawing we could have produced from scratch. It fixed a quantum of development the council had already found acceptable in the Green Belt, and it established the site as previously developed land.
The harder and far less visible work was pinning down exactly how much land that entitled the site to. Over months of negotiation with Rugby Borough Council we worked through what counted as previously developed, by footprint and by volume, on the basis of the buildings actually standing there and the demolition of the derelict ones. It settled at about 3.5 acres of the 25.7. It also moved: the area the council would accept is a band along the road frontage, a materially different shape from the block the old consent occupied. Two drawings from September 2017, on the same base and the same scale, record both, and they are the drawings the rest of the case rested on.
We tested uses against that footprint before committing to one. A care village in Use Class C2 and open market housing in Class C3 were both worked up and compared on footprint, volume and land take against the consented garden centre, and the relocation of the garden centre itself to the south east of the site was looked at as well. C2 was the option that carried the strongest need case and the lowest built impact for the accommodation it delivered.
The scheme that came out of it was a care village of 160 homes: a 36 bed care centre with the communal rooms, the cafe, the hairdresser, the activity rooms and the library at the heart of the site, and 124 assisted living units dispersed around it in fourteen further buildings. Every unit has its own front door. The point of the model is that a resident can move from independent living to full care without leaving. All of it two storeys, with the core building at 10 to 12 m to ridge and the rest at 8 to 9 m, deliberately domestic against the commercial spans and heights the extant consent already permitted.
We authored the Design and Access Statement through seven issues to March 2019, took the illustrative masterplan through thirteen revisions between November 2016 and August 2019, ran the pre-application consultation and coordinated the planning, landscape, ecology, highways and cost consultants around one argument. The last three revisions are all tree work: the layout adjusted around a single specimen, then adjusted again to protect others, then the western buildings relocated east to clear a tree belt entirely. Separately, we discharged the external materials condition on the extant garden-centre consent, so the value already on the site stayed alive while the larger case was pursued.
The application went in as an outline, reference R18/0167, with access the only matter not reserved. We were the architect and design author on it; the submission itself was run by the client's own planning consultant. By the autumn of 2019 the case was strong enough that the council's planning officers recommended it for approval. At committee the members split, and the application was refused on the chair's casting vote, on a single ground: that the very special circumstances required to justify development in the Green Belt had not, in their view, been demonstrated. A standing highways objection and tree retention were both live at committee.
Nothing was built and no consent was granted, and this page does not pretend otherwise. What the work produced was a professional recommendation for approval on a Green Belt site, an agreed developable area that survives whoever comes to the land next, and a refusal drawn so narrowly that it turns on one testable question of need. On constrained land, that is what the value actually consists of, and it is settled long before anyone draws a building.
