It was an Open Day organised by supermarket chain Lidl to explain to potential customers their plans for a new foodstore at Brookfield on the A57 on the former Wild and Hallam showroom.
They were quite literally giving consumers a taste of what Lidl had in store for them.
Curiously the flyer begins with the words "we will shortly be submitting a planning application..."
Well almost 12 months later and after withdrawing a previous application Lidl finally submitted and had their application considered by the Development and Control Committee last night at the Council Offices in Chinley.
CLICK ON PHOTO BELOW FOR LARGER IMAGE
May our blog be the first media channel to inform local residents that the committee made a UNANIMOUS decision to REFUSE the application, for reasons which I will set out below.
To begin with it is perhaps not a wholly surprising verdict given that the Officers recommendation was to refuse anyhow. However, this committee has sprung a few surprises in the past and indeed later that evening went on to overturn the Officer's recommendation to refuse 6 additional storage silos in Whaley Bridge.
So nothing can be assumed until questions have been put, debate has taken place and the arguments won or lost in the battleground of council chamber.
This is where Lidl perished.
Adrian Fisher, Chief Planning Officer for HPBC stepped up to the plate first, explaining the technical reasons why the application could not be supported. The technical issues involved can be summarised as follows:
Loss of Employment Land
Impact on Existing Town Centres
Residential Amenity
Highways Impact
Flood Risk
Visual Apperance
From the list, Flood risk and Highways Impact were clearly the most important considerations, since what was being proposed here was a food store and it seems fairly obvious to most people that an area that is prone to quite severe flooding at times is perhaps not the best place to store food! Indeed the Environment Agency had already weighed in with their objection on flood risk grounds.
Similarly, one wonders how long motorists trying to access the store from the opposite lane would have to wait for a break in the traffic and what length of queues they would have built up in doing so were the application allowed.
Puzzlingly, none of this seemed to worry the County Highways Chiefs over in Matlock, who saw no reason to object to an application that needed 70+ parking spaces, which is close to the Woolley Bridge bottleneck on a road that is almost at capacity!
Tied in with this fact was the issue of how a food store here would affect the town centre of Glossop and other food stores in Hadfield. The strategy being adopted by the council is to try and make the town centre attractive for shoppers and to try and create a hub where shoppers can satisfy their needs in a single trip.
It was suggested by Mr Fisher that out of town stores such as this would undermine the viability of the town centre, therefore undermining all the work that has been done so far to revitalise and regenerate designated retail zones. In particular, Woods Mill was cited as a far more appropriate place for a development of this size and nature.
TO BE CONTINUED........
