The campus as we found it in January 2025, from the drone survey, and a real photograph rather than a visualisation. Works underway across six hectares, the pitches already laid over, and a formal notice expected within weeks.
The full story
When Oxford Business College took on its Nottingham campus on Carlton Road, it inherited about six hectares with real ambition behind it and a serious planning problem underneath it. Works to convert the former sports and leisure facility into a cafe and library had already started without permission. Sports pitches had been laid over for parking. Trees had been removed that should not have been. An informal enforcement notice had been served, the council had ordered work on site to stop, and a formal notice was expected within weeks.
We were appointed in late January 2025 to resolve the planning position of the entire campus, and to turn a regularisation exercise into a coherent long term estate plan. We were not the designers of anything that had been built before that date.
The position we inherited would have sunk many projects. A tangled planning history sat behind the site: one application invalid, another undetermined and carrying highway safety objections, an entrance scheme, and tree works that had breached a consent requiring eighteen replacement trees. None of the red lines matched. No surveys existed. The part built cafe and library had fundamental circulation and means of escape defects that no amount of paperwork could fix.
The hardest constraint was time. A credible retrospective application had to be prepared, coordinated and submitted in roughly three weeks, from a standing start, on a campus with no topographical survey, no tree survey and no ecology baseline, bounded by a railway and with gas apparatus running through it. Get it wrong and the enforcement case would harden and the whole programme would stall.
Within days we had agreed a strategy with the council. Rather than patch the failed applications one by one, we extended the red line to capture all of the unauthorised works, including the car park on the former pitches, and replaced the muddle with a coordinated suite of applications, each aligned to a single campus wide masterplan we produced to govern every boundary, baseline and future phase.
We assembled and directed a consultant team of more than ten disciplines, from civil and structural engineering, including the Network Rail interface for the retaining walls, to fire engineering, landscape, ecology and biodiversity net gain, arboriculture, topographical survey, drainage and acoustics. The retrospective cafe and library application went in before the enforcement deadline.
Then we designed our way out of the site's as built problems. The cafe and library was resolved with a redesigned layout and a rear extension developed with the fire engineers. The windows and finishes application was steered through with a formal response that avoided a costly re-cladding of the entrance structure. The two retaining walls were negotiated through ground investigation, temporary works and materials discussions into an approvable engineered design. On the ground, the eighteen replacement trees were agreed with the council's tree officer and planted, closing out the breach. Throughout, we were the client's single point of order, briefing the owner through masterplan presentations, advising on construction health and safety duties, and engaging Building Control ahead of construction.
Between 23 March and 8 May 2026 Nottingham City Council granted three planning permissions: the replacement windows and finishes, the cafe and library, and the two retaining walls. Two of the three carry no condition beyond the standard time limit. A fourth application, for an external cafe, was prepared and submitted alongside them.
More than the consents, the campus now holds a coordinated masterplan with the next phases mapped: the auditorium and amphitheatre, then a student union, then expansion to the south. The programme is on hold while the owner settles the long term plan. The hard part, taking the site off enforcement and giving it a defensible planning structure, is done.
