The council's pre-application advice was that it was unlikely to support apartments here. Nine months later it granted seven.
The approach from Barrowfield Lane. Visualisation of the consented scheme; the apartments are consented and not yet built.
One 1920s house on a wooded plot near Kenilworth town centre, demolished for seven two- and three-bedroom apartments over three storeys, inside the conservation area and next door to a listed building.
Warwick District Council ref W/19/2064, on the public register. Granted at the first attempt, no appeal, no legal agreement. Fifteen conditions, four of them pre-commencement.
A developer bought a substantial 1920s house standing in mature grounds a few minutes from Kenilworth town centre. The plot was generous. Almost everything around it was protected.
Houses, assisted living and apartments were all tested. Apartments were the form that fitted the plot without spreading across it.
The pre-application response is the turn in this project. Everything after it is the answer to what that response asked for.
A pre-application no is a list of things to prove.
The council named five: the street scene, the character of the conservation area, the protected trees, the setting of the listed building, and screening. We answered them one at a time, and applied for the lower number we had tested.
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The application went in in January 2020 and was granted on 28 August 2020, with revised drawings still going in on 14 April, three weeks into the first national lockdown.
The pre-application enquiry was registered in 2019 and tested seven to nine apartments. The meeting was held on the site itself on 25 September. The written response came back on 20 November with a recommendation of unlikely to support, and with the reasons set out plainly: the principle of replacing the house in a conservation area, in the setting of a grade II listed building, would not be supported unless a detailed scheme could prove there would be no adverse effect on the street scene, on the character of the conservation area, on the protected trees or on the listed setting, and that the site would stay properly screened. It also said, in the same document, that the existing house made a neutral contribution and that there was no objection in principle to its demolition, and that red sandstone would be a suitable material here. That is not a refusal. It is a brief.
The design answered it in three moves. The building was fanned into three splayed wings around two stair cores, which keeps the footprint compact, holds the mature planting on the boundaries, and lets the thing read as one large house standing in a garden rather than as a block of flats. The lowest floor was set into the five-metre fall across the site, so the building presents fewer storeys from uphill than it actually contains. And the material palette was led with a red sandstone base under lighter finned upper storeys, which is the move the conservation officer had already said would work.
The trees set the access. The existing entrance could not serve seven apartments, and the only workable alternative ran between a copper beech and an Atlas cedar, both covered by Tree Preservation Order No.59 of March 1982 and both surveyed as category A, the highest grade, with more than forty years of life ahead of them. Their root protection areas are 272 and 573 square metres. The entrance was set between them and the protection areas kept whole, with the highway authority's safe and suitable access test met at the same time. Thirty-three trees, groups and hedgerows were surveyed in all. Four of the five protected trees are retained; the fifth was already a standing dead cedar and is replaced.
The application was submitted at the start of January 2020 for seven apartments, the lowest number tested at pre-application, and ran the whole way through the first COVID-19 lockdown with the council working remotely. Revised drawings, including the full landscape set that answered the hardstanding point, were submitted on 14 April 2020. Permission was granted on 28 August 2020 with fifteen conditions, four of them pre-commencement: a badger sett monitoring survey, a sustainability statement, the tree protection measures from the arboricultural method statement, and a construction environment management plan. There was no appeal, no refusal to appeal against, and no legal agreement.
Every drawing on the permission is ours, and so was the pre-application that told us what the permission would need. Four consultant disciplines, one application, one decision.
An unlikely-to-support is worth having early. It costs weeks. A refusal costs a year.
A topographic survey underpinned all of it, and the section is drawn off it.
A consent is an asset from the day it is issued. This one is unimplemented and undisputed.
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