Ludford parish council was due to hear two presentations at its meeting tonight.
Simon Hoare was due to present details of the supermarket proposal for Rocks Green. He cancelled and will not be presenting his plans to the parish council until September.
The other presentation did take place. John Acres from Turley Associates and Mike Jones from Richborough Estates talked the audience of about 25 people through their proposals for Foldgate Lane. They talked rather than presented. They are keeping the plans under wraps until the exhibition next Monday, preferring to launch them to the public as a whole, rather than to select groups.
Despite the lack of graphics, they very responsive to the audience and we learnt a lot from them. They are acting for the Small family who own the land. Once the site gains planning permission, Richborough will sell the land to a housebuilder.
The development will be of just under 150 homes. They will be laid out in a series of clusters. Mike said he was surprised at how low Shropshire Council’s affordable housing quota is. He did not suggest that the site will provide any more than the council’s current quota of 15%. In response to a question, he said he could not guarantee that once the site is sold, the builders would not apply for a higher number of houses on the site.
Vehicle access will be from a new junction on the A49. This will be a priority junction, a T-junction, rather than a roundabout. There will no access from Sheet Road via Tuffins or from Steventon Road. All vehicle traffic will be from the A49.
Foldgate Lane will remain as it is, narrow and hedged. It will however be crossed by a new road that will link the housing west of Foldgate Lane to the A49. This traffic will not be physically able to turn into Foldgate Lane – I didn’t understand the details of how this could be achieved. There will be pedestrian and cycle access onto Foldgate Lane.
There was much discussion about having a pedestrian link onto Greenacres. This would go through one of the existing houses on Greenacres, owned by the Small family. The link is not in current plans and there seemed little support for the idea in the audience. There will not be road access from Greenacres.
In response to a claim that the site will be isolated from the town because the road access was only to the bypass, John and Mike claimed that pedestrian, cycle and bus links would provide easy access to the centre and make the development sustainable. They said they couldn’t really work out why this site had not be included in the SAMDev plan for Ludlow instead of housing beyond the bypass which is isolated from the town.
Mike said that he expected an application for planning permission to be submitted by the end of August.
The exhibition is at the Bishop Mascall Centre on Lower Galdeford from 2pm until 8pm next Monday, 28 July.
