From the Canal to Sevenways

Category: Planning

  • Stretford Town Centre – Consultation

    Stretford Town Centre – Consultation

    Currently, Chester Road and Kingsway sever the Mall from the rest of Stretford and create dangerous, uncomfortable crossings for residents and high levels of pollution and noise.

    Stretford Town Centre Consultation – Accessibility

    My thoughts on the Accessibility of the Town Centre

    Too limited in scale. The plan assumes that people only walk to the town centre from an area not much further out than Victoria Park. In making this assumption, it confines its consideration of severance to the A56 and Kingsway.

    Stretford Foodhall and other venues that have started up in recent years are already successfully exploiting the walkability of the nearest neighbourhoods. The new homes planned for the centre will add further to this ultra-local market. However, the best potential increase in the town centre’s market share lies beyond the immediate area.

    A walkable journey of fifteen minutes could reasonably define the catchment that Stretford needs to exploit. Applying this extends the area out towards:

    • Lostock/Sevenways/Derbyshire Estate,
    • Moss Road,
    • Gorse Hill,
    • The Quadrant,
    • Longford,
    • The Meadows,
    • Urmston Lane,
    • Moss Park.

    The routes serving these neighbourhoods from Stretford are typically busy fast roads with narrow pavements, often in poor condition and subject to aggressive pavement parking. Certain junctions are already notoriously unsafe.

    The council could work with Living Streets – Stretford to engage with the community in identifying further severance and improving walkability.

    The risk of not addressing this is that Stretford loses walking market penetration, putting people in a taxi to Manchester rather than taking an unpleasant 10-minute walk to their local town centre.

    Edit

    As a consequence of this post, my twitter friend Owler Nook has posted an isochrone map of Stretford showing increments of walking areas. This is a live calculation available here

    Isochrone from Open Route Service

    What really underlines the importance of attracting these potential customers for Stretford all living within 15 minutes is the scale. The plan is focusing all its accessibility improvements on the inner ‘red’ area currently accommodating 1500 residents. Take it out to the 15 minute range and you’re targeting fifteen thousand people.

  • Addressing the broken housing market

    Addressing the broken housing market

    I chaired a good meeting last night looking at social housing within Trafford. It was a meeting I was quite keen to have. I think a lot of us had picked up on a perfect storm affecting people hoping to set up home in Trafford. Inflated house prices, a dysfunctional private rented sector and a social housing sector growing ever more distant from their tenants and the greater community of Trafford are creating real hardships. We’re all too aware of how difficult it is to get good quality accommodation with a landlord committed to ensuring their properties remain decent places to live. High rents mean it’s very difficult to save sufficient deposits. No-fault evictions mean tenants are forced to leave properties at the whim of their landlord in order to put up rents or to sell at inflated prices. The cost of moving at such short notice further erodes any chances to save. It is a broken housing market.

    I wanted the meeting to look at the extent the Council can intervene. Frustratingly, the obvious solution of delivering old-fashioned council houses seems bedevilled with insurmountable obstacles. In order to provide council houses, the Council would have to borrow with the expectation of generating income from rent or sale. Right-to-buy automatic discounts of up to £85,000 make it impossible to recoup the investment. Trafford currently is such a high demand area, we’d never be able to build up sufficient stock to make it viable.

    We know Thatcher aspired to a home-owning democracy. However, inflated house prices partly generated by the private rented sector those over-generous discounts have crushed that aspiration and we have got huge disparities between the ages. We have a problem with few tools at our disposal to alleviate the impact.

    I think there’s a sense in Trafford that nationally, Labour can’t ignore this problem any longer. Labour is the only party that can hope to reset the housing market and it’s blindingly obvious that council housing has to be part of the mix. We need to shout about it more than we are doing. Economically it has a hugely detrimental effect on our cities.

    Meanwhile, we need to call out Housing Associations. They need to deliver on those core values that provide their charitable status. Clearly, the Mayor’s focus to now has been on planning where development can take place. It’s now time to shift the focus onto tenure and tackling exploitative rents.

    A good little meeting (40 mins) but with a real focus on tackling the inequities of housing. We haven’t got all the tools we need but at least we’ve brought it back to the fore of thinking.

  • June Update (Planning) Surfing on its way

    June Update (Planning) Surfing on its way

    Cricket Ground – new Red Rose stand incorporating hotel

    The Red Rose development at Lancashire Cricket Club was allowed at planning committee. Essentially this is reduced size hotel compared to a previous application. I’m not exactly bowled over by the plan. I’m quite proud of Old Trafford cricket ground and this does not seem up to their usual standard. Doesn’t seem to have attracted opposition from the cricket club’s membership, but I think they could have done better.

    Warwick Road Development

    Warwick Road Development Refused by the planning committee

    The development on Warwick Road was refused at the May planning committee. The grounds for refusal are listed as primarily that its site coverage, height, scale and massing, would have a dominating and adverse impact on the streetscene, fail to integrate with and complement neighbouring development, fail to make the best of the
    opportunity to improve the character and quality of the area.

    Discussion at the planning committee centred on the development providing no parking whatsoever. This seems to be a growing phenomenon and we saw something similar in Sale town centre this week. The feeling expressed is that there should be ‘some’ parking even if it’s not a space per apartment. My view on that is that it’s better to provide none than ‘not enough’, otherwise you’re creating an inbuilt tension within the development and with existing residents. Having said that, I do think that the massing in particular was inappropriate to the street and support the refusal.

    New application Surfing Centre on Barton Dock Road

    Surfing Trafford

    The proposed redevelopment seeks to transform a previously developed industrial site, now vacant, into a new regionally significant leisure and sports facility focused on providing surfing, skate, climbing and other associated activities including food & beverage.

    The site has already been cleared of previous light-industrial employment buildings in 2014, leaving only concrete hard-standing. More recently the area has been used as storage for containers. The proposal will also utilise a 1.3 ha site on the east-side of Park Way (A5081) that is currently underused residual land from the former rail line through Trafford Park, linked to the main site via a tunnel under the road.

    The proposal, known as ‘Modern Surf Manchester’, is centred around a large outdoor shallow lake known as the ‘Cove’ which creates artificial waves designed for optimum surfing conditions via a central mechanical ‘Pier’. The system is powered by technology provided and managed by ‘Wavegarden’ (WG), whose systems are widely regarded
    as the most realistic artificial surf technology to have been developed globally to date.

    The Modern Surf facility at TraffordCity will form part of a wider network of Wavegarden surf coves around the world, with four open presently and a further 30 planned including at least three in the UK.

    I love this proposal and hope it progresses. The car parking is actually provided in Gorse Hill Ward using the container base sidings on our side of Parkway. I’ve been in touch with the developer to plea for them to look at the route through Lostock Park to improve the juncture with St Modwen’s Way as a planning gain. There seems on the face of it to be a good symbiosis with Lostock Park’s renowned skate board facilities and it would be beneficial to improve links.

    Planning Application (Surf Centre) Link

    New application: Newsagent to become a Takeaway

    Newsagents opposite Gorse Hill Park on Talbot Road

    There’s an application to convert the newsagents on Talbot Road to a Takeaway.

    Planning Application (Takeaway) link

    New Application Warwick Rd South

    Current Site

    This is an application for 126 apartments on the corner facing Old Trafford Metrolink spot. We’re waiting to see what they’re proposing with their contribution to affordable housing but as it stands it looks as though this is for private sale and rental.

    It’s hard to see that this won’t be a highly saleable site. It’s a location calling for development for a long time and I’m pleased to see things beginning to move. I’ve actually been trying for a long time to have the Ayres Road corridor included in the Civic Quarter Masterplan and it’s a shame that we aren’t in a better place to determine shaping the plans and supporting placemaking. That said, the outline application already submitted looked attractive and they seem to be sticking with those aspects.

    link to planning application
  • More New Homes for Trafford Wharf?

    More New Homes for Trafford Wharf?

    It’s reported that Hilti, are moving their UK headquarters from Trafford Wharf Road into central Manchester. The site they’re vacating is a large one and it’s being marketed as suitable for residential.

    It could be that this site together with the twin towers of No1 Old Trafford, next door is providing up to 800 new homes (given this is a slightly larger site).

    I’ve asked for updates from the council officers. It’s early days but it’s not out of the question that yet more could follow. Up to now that area has largely been focused on offices. The market has changed and we’ll want to keep an eye on developments. It’s an area with excellent transport links with investment in walkability and cycling on the Salford side. I can see a lot going for it, but we’ve got to make sure that services like GPs, Dentists and Schools can meet demand.

    Full Story