Contact us
Visit CPRE.org
Donate
The campaign to save Wincheap Water Meadows in Canterbury from city council's own park & ride scheme
On Tuesday, October 15, Canterbury City Council approved a highly controversial planning application to extend its Wincheap Park & Ride car park on to a large stretch of floodplain next to the River Stour, an area of land known as Wincheap Water Meadows.
The principle of extending the park & ride is largely uncontentious. Part of the existing footprint of the park & ride will be lost when a new slip road off the A2 is constructed, and there is an accepted need to replace the parking spaces lost and increase capacity for the future.
What is highly contentious is the choice of location for the extension. The council’s chosen location is a large area of functional floodplain outside the city’s urban boundary.
The car park will extend for more than 250 metres along the Stour in an Area of High Landscape Value, a designated Green Corridor and a Local Wildlife Site.
The council’s planning report pretends there will be no real landscape impact and that views of the car park from the Great Stour Way on the opposite riverbank will only be “glimpsed”. In reality, the landscape impact is likely to be substantial.
Views across the river from the Great Stour Way, at present greatly enjoyed by the large number of walkers and cyclists who use it, will be turned into something much less attractive.
As the application was made by Canterbury City Council for its own land, many members of the public feel the council had an even greater duty to present the facts of the application in an unbiased and comprehensive manner. As it is, the planning report reads like a report from the applicant itself rather than an impartial assessment.
Development on the water meadows breaches many of the council’s own policies and strategies, including many policies in its Local Plan, its Open Spaces Policy, its Riverside Strategy, its Green Infrastructure Strategy and the Canterbury Conservation Area Appraisal.
However, the council argues that local residents had the opportunity to object when it consulted on its Transport Strategy in 2015-2016 and that the principle of development on that location was accepted when the Local Plan was adopted in 2017.
The fact that residents simply did not know where the extension was going to be located is conveniently ignored. The Environment Agency objected strongly to the first planning application earlier this year but was informed by the council that it couldn’t maintain its objection as it had not objected when the Local Plan was approved.
Kent Wildlife Trust has also submitted a very strong objection, saying: “We regard the compensation strategy proposed for this development as fundamentally flawed and in clear contravention of existing national and local planning policy.”
Many of the opponents to the application point out that Canterbury City Council owns most of the large industrial estate adjacent to the park & ride and that it should be building car parks on brownfield land rather than greenfield land.
However, the council refuses to consider any other alternative. It claims that its recent Declaration of Climate Emergency means that reducing the carbon emissions from cars takes precedence over the protection of the natural environment – claim many people find totally perverse.
The Save Wincheap Water Meadows campaign has attracted a huge amount of public support and the Canterbury branch of CPRE has played a lead role in challenging the application.
There are more than 3,100 signatures on a Change.org petition, 775 representations from the public objecting to the planning application (with only one representation in favour) and more than 460 members in the campaign’s Facebook group.
There have been many letters and articles in the local paper and large numbers of people attending the council meetings where the park & ride proposal has been discussed. There have also been a number of songs written about the campaign by a local musician, Richard Navarro, including the one below:
You can read the council’s planning application report here
Wednesday, December 2, 2019
- A number of important documents have yet to emerge. For example, a rigorous transport plan and a finalised air-quality assessment. The latter is critical given that allocations at Teynham will feed extra traffic into AQMAs.
- There seems to be no coherent plan for infrastructure delivery – a key component of the plan given the allocations being proposed near the already crowded Junction 7.
- There seems to have been little or no cooperation with neighbouring boroughs or even parish councils within Swale itself.
The removal of a second consultation might have been understandable if this final version of the plan were similar to that being talked about at the beginning of the consultation process. It is, however, radically different in the following ways:
- There has been a major shift in the balance of housing allocations, away from the west of the borough over to the east, especially around the historic town of Faversham. This is a move that raises many concerns.
- A new large allocation, with accompanying A2 bypass, has appeared around Teynham and Lynsted, to which we are objecting.
- Housing allocations in the AONB around Neames Forstal that were judged “unsuitable” by the council’s own officers have now appeared as part of the housing numbers.
- Most of the housing allocations being proposed are on greenfield sites, many of them on Grade 1 agricultural land – a point to which we are strongly objecting.
Concerns about the rush to submit the plan
The haste with which the plan is being prepared is especially worrying given the concentration of housing in Faversham. If the town is to take a large amount of new housing, it is imperative that the policies concerning the area are carefully worked out to preserve, as far as possible, the unique nature of the town. The rush to submit the plan is likely to prove detrimental.
As Swale does not have a five-year land housing supply, it is open to speculative development proposals, many of which would run counter to the ideas contained in the current plan. Some are already appearing. This is a common situation, and one that, doubtless, is a reason behind Swale’s haste.
Our overriding fear, however, is that this emphasis on haste is ultimately going to prove counterproductive. This is because it is our view that the plan, in its current form, is unlikely to pass independent examination. We are urging Swale to listen to and act upon the comments being made about the plan and to return the plan to the council with appropriate modifications before submitting it to the Secretary of State.
Essentially, this means treating the current consultation not as the final one but as the ‘lost’ second consultation.
The consultation ends on Friday 30 April and we strongly urge residents to make their opinions known if they have not already done so.
Further information
