Owen Temple

This week’s Development Control meeting on Thursday December 13th at 2.00 p.m. sees Glenroyd House return to the agenda.

In August an application to turn the whole building into offices, accessed just via the narrow sidestreet (called Larch Street), was knocked back unanimously by the Development Control Committee. That decision is now under appeal at the Planning Inspectorate.

The new application is for a much more limited use of the building and would involve the Derwentside Council for Voluntary Service and the Citizens Advice Bureau using a smaller part of the building for their office activities. Crucially the application proposes a new shared access with Rosemount Care Home. This is a much safer access as it is sited away from the bend and can be made wider than the Larch Street access.

This, allied to the greatly reduced number of rooms to be used (and therefore reduced numbers of staff and visitors) makes the application much more acceptable in my eyes. If you want to look at it and make your own judgement, just click this link: http://www.derwentside.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=8427&step=4&ref=1/2007/0901

Even though the application is much better than the previous one, however, I have written to ask the committee consider two additional conditions. One is that the hours of operation are limited to 8.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.. The other is that the rear entrance onto Larch Street has locked gates. The application says that fewer than two delivery and maintenance vehicles a week will us the Larch Street entrance; in that case, only locked gates will prevent other users from using this inadequate access and causing the problems that caused residents so much distress over the original application.