More details have emerged of controversial plan to expand Hereford southward with a new 201-home estate.
Herefordshire councillors agreed by just one vote in 2022 to grant outline permission to housebuilder Taylor Wimpey to develop 10 hectares of farmland along Grafton Lane west of the A49, immediately south of the Hereford-Abergavenny railway.
Little more was then heard of the scheme until rival homebuilder Bellway Homes submitted a so-called “reserved matters” planning application for the site in April, setting out the intended make-up and layout of the scheme, and dropping the number of houses from the 230 originally proposed to 201.
Now Bellway has made a further application (263273) on the back of the original approval, seeking to meet a condition attached to it requiring details of the phasing of the proposed scheme.
Bellway’s submission now includes a 100-page document confirming that a new signal-controlled junction will be created where the main access road to the estate meets the A49 opposite the current Romany Way.
Unlike the original plans, the existing north end of Grafton Lane will not be stopped up but will instead serve solely as an access road for four existing properties immediately to its north, and will be cut off from the estate’s main access road.
The rest of Grafton Lane would remain open to through traffic via the new A49 junction, allowing farm traffic to continue to use it, “and not have to detour through the development access road, which is essentially a residential street”, the strategy points out.
It adds that according to National Highways, which manages the A49 trunk road, gaining approval for the new junction “may take around 18 months”, leaving “the hope that the junction could be constructed and open for use by September 2028”.
But with approval of the reserved matters bid expected by the end of this year, building work could begin on the northeast part of the site as early as next January, it says, consisting of 51 units of “much-needed local housing, including social housing”.
These could be occupied as early as next September, a whole year before the new junction is in place, so would use the existing, widened Grafton Lane, for temporary access.
Comments are not being taken on this latest application, though it appears they are still being accepted on the reserved matters bid.
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