HBC proposes Bulverhythe housing project while United mull Hollington move

While the proposed Combe Valley Sports Village on the Bulverhythe recreation ground has died a death, Hastings Borough Council is pushing ahead with plans for a large housing estate on the site. Meanwhile Hastings United is looking at developing a new football ground in Hollington. Nick Terdre reports.

Armed with the offer of a £6.9 million grant for flood mitigation measures, HBC committed at the Cabinet meeting this month to push ahead with plans to build a housing estate with some 170 homes on the lower tier of Bulverhythe recreation ground, to the north of Bexhill Road. Officers have been directed to start the search for a developer partner and possible funding sources.

The project is also on the agenda for the November meeting, for which the forward plan for Cabinet decisions lists a proposal for a “mixed tenure residential development” on the site.

As part of the same item, the plan also lists the “relocation of the Football Club and additional sporting facilities to Council owned land at Tile Kiln Lane.” Tile Kiln Lane runs into the Country Park, but HOT understands that this should read Tile Barn Lane, alongside the Tesco supermarket in Hollington, where there is a recreation ground.

Another possibility, according to a council source, is that the new ground would be sited on the old helipad site beside Queensway.

HUFC chairman David Nessling said he could not comment while discussions were under way with the council, but he hoped to make an announcement in the not too distant future.

Hastings United was one of the main backers of the Combe Valley Sports Village  which was proposed to be sited on Bulverhythe recreation ground, along with a housing estate. The project was left stranded, however, when Keepmoat, the developer partner, pulled out around the New Year.

Its departure was believed to be at least partly linked to the widespread flooding to which the site is subject.

New grant for flood mitigation

The money now offered for flood mitigation would come from Homes England’s Housing Infrastructure Fund, council leader Peter Chowney told HOT. It would replace the £2.25m offered by the fund for the same purpose in connection with the sports village project.

The flood mitigation measures paid for by the grant would have to be sufficient to lower the flood risk category assigned to the lower tier by the Environment Agency to a level which would allow housing development, Chowney told HOT – at present the rating is too high.

Homes England’s new offer, three times higher than the earlier one, appears to recognise that the cost of flood mitigation would be much higher than previously thought.

In his October ward report the council leader wrote that as the site is owned by the council, “…we would have control over any proposed housing scheme if we developed the site ourselves. We could also guarantee a decent number of social rented homes in the scheme.” Engineering studies would be needed to establish whether the grant was enough to cover the whole cost of flood mitigation, he added – it would only be forthcoming as part of a housing development.

Other advantages of a housing development on the site would be to reduce the flood designation for the whole area, adding value to existing houses, making them easier to sell and flood protection insurance easier to get, he wrote.

An application for a village green on the site might have derailed the HBC project but has now been turned down by East Sussex County Council.

Local residents’ objections

However, objections have  been raised by Bulverhythe Protectors, a local residents’ group formed to oppose the sports village proposal, which says that the council’s project faces the same series of problems. The chair, Peter Clarke, said he would be sceptical if the same flood mitigation scheme as put forward for the sports village were adopted – pumping water uphill to Pebsham, another flood site – as this would be difficult and costly.

“There are other sites around Hastings designated for housing which would be safer,” he told HOT.

Clarke himself lives in a house backing onto the recreation ground, the cellar of which is regularly flooded during rainy periods. Some residents are able to get house insurance and others not, he said.

Before it was turned into a recreation ground, the Bulverhythe site was used as a dump for high-grade hospital waste, Clarke said – there are still locals who remember seeing the yellow bags being deposited. The site also lies downhill from the current landfill site to the north, from which contaminated water leaks into the rivers which run either side of the site.

Air quality, which is presumably poor around a busy thoroughfare like Bexhill Road, would be likely to deteriorate further with the arrival of several hundred new residents’ vehicles, exacerbated by the jams likely to ensue from the higher levels of traffic; the recent installation of bus lanes has already has a detrimental effect on traffic flows along Bexhill Road, Clarke said.

Meanwhile at last week’s planning committee meeting an HBC application for outline planning permission for a 16-unit housing scheme on the south side of Bexhill Road, behind numbers 419-447, was refused by a majority vote, with one councillor quoting guidance in the National Planning Policy Framework advising against building on sites subject to flood risk.

 

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