Plans for new homes at farm near Kington, Herefordshire
Permission has been granted to knock down farm buildings near a Herefordshire town and replace them with five new houses
Messrs Gwatkin applied last August to permit the scheme at Newburn Farm near Kington, where permission has already been granted to convert redundant steel-framed barns into houses.
They argued that the alternative, clean-slate development of three- and four-bedroom houses would bring “considerable improvements to the landscape”, as well as being “far more energy-efficient” than the conversion plan.
But Herefordshire Council’s senior landscape officer Nigel Koch said that, far from being “an eyesore” as claimed, the existing buildings contributed to “a rural farm character, with a range of scales, heights, and forms that create a varied and interesting built setting within the landscape”.
The new buildings with their “residential paraphernalia” would by contrast “make the setting appear like a peri-urban rural settlement with a homogeneous appearance”.
Kington Town Council objected to the new scheme over its road access and “limited” parking, while siting solar panels on the ground, rather than on the barn roofs as currently, “will make them more conspicuous”.
Among six public objections, Gillian Coppock said the proposal “is for five large houses when what is actually needed in Kington is smaller, lower-cost housing”.
And nearby resident Dr Peter Cornish said the access road, part of the Herefordshire Trail, was “a much-used public footpath” on which “walkers and vehicles do not coexist well” – a situation that would be “massively exacerbated” by the “inevitable significant increase” in traffic.
But the council’s highways officer said that following amendments to the scheme, they had no objections to it so long as cycle parking was included.
Planning officer Emma Jones considered the new house designs were “in keeping with the scale and agrarian nature of existing buildings on site”.
And while they represented “unjustified development in the open countryside” contrary to local planning policy, she attached “significant weight” to the fact that a fallback position of converting the barns had already been approved.
Full planning permission was granted.
