We initially won a hard fought planning appeal to remove the long established, highly protected employment land status from a ‘strategic site’ at the key A12 junction next to the Tollgate retail area. That facilitated a first phase, six unit, leisure park.

To release a larger, adjoining site, we worked up thorough retail impact and sequential test arguments, demonstrating a further diminishing of employment land requirements. Through negotiations and numerous discussions, we convinced the Council that permission should be granted for circa 21,000m² of bulky goods space (including for B&Q) together with food stores for M&S and Aldi at what is now known as Stane Retail Park.

Building upon this success and the effective relationship secured with Officers, a series of further planning submissions increased the overall floorspace and relaxed the scheme’s retail use restrictions. These facilitated the accommodation of a full range M&S store - relocating out of the town centre - and other tenants.

A strategy was devised to secure beneficial amendments to the retail park consent, through a series of individual NMA applications, carefully drafted and submitted to achieve the desired outcome without requiring more onerous, timely and potentially more restrictive s.73 process.

The scheme was a finalist of the RICS Commercial Development of the Year Award (2022) with the judges recognising that the scheme had “successfully harnessed the changing retail world”.