Parkside Woodland and Harcourt Close Overdevelopment Planning Applications Dismissed
Two planning applications which both Henley Town Council, The Henley Society and many residents objected too have been dismissed.
The first was the owner’s appeal against South Oxfordshire District Council refusal to grant permission for 8 apartments with associated parking at Parkside/Pack and Prime Lane which last week was dismissed by the Planning Inspectorate. This is a protected woodland site comprising of many TPO’d trees and is home to bats, deer and many species of bird. This was the third application on this site in the last few years. The site was also originally put forward in 2015 for a proposed housing site in the Joint Henley & Harpsden Neighbourhood Plan and was rejected. In May 2017 plans were submitted for 15 apartments and in February 2018 amended plans were submitted for 10 apartments.
The second application was a repeat application to construct 5 flats on the site of one home in Harcourt Close which was refused by SODC on the grounds that by virtue of its scale, massing and amount of hard landscaping it represented an overdevelopment of the site, and totally out of keeping with the established character of the surrounding built form. In May 2015 a planning application was approved to build a three bedroom dwelling. Since then owner, Mr Ray Hudson has submitted three further applications to build five apartments (one x 1 bed, two x 2 beds, two x 3 beds) in a three-storey building. The first application was submitted in October 2020 with amended plans submitted in December 2020 with one of the two bedded apartments being reduced to one bedroom. This application was recommended by Henley Town Council to be refused and was refused by South Oxfordshire District Council in June 2021.
The Henley Society Chairman, Geoff Luckett said, “The Henley Society truly believes that ‘people pressure properly harnessed’ does have an effect, nowhere better illustrated than in the refusal of two planning applications, which we considered undesirable, in the past week.”
