The plans to replace the King Alfred Leisure Centre look like being a couple of storeys higher and including dozens more flats as the developer tries to make the sums add up.
Save Hove campaigner Valerie Paynter, who campaigned against the previous Karis plans for the site, teased out the details over the Christmas and new year break.
She contacted Rob Starr, of the Starr Trust, which is working with housebuilder Crest Nicholson on the £400 million project.
And on the Save Hove website she quoted him saying: “The development agreement is being drawn now by solicitors from both sides and will be signed in the new year as agreed.
“In fact a letter of reassurance went to (the council) just this morning from the board of Crest confirming all this.”
Mr Starr told Brighton and Hove News that the tallest of the planned buildings would probably be more like 20 storeys high rather than 18 as previously envisaged.
With taller buildings costing more, the architects are believed to be working on the best way to keep the height down. But they also need to include enough housing to pay for the new £40 million swimming and leisure complex.
The number of flats is likely to increase from about 580 to about 660, Mr Starr said. It is possible that the final plans could include a slightly higher number.
The plans will, though, include fewer flats than the 750 given planning permission in the Karis scheme.
Twenty per cent of the proposed homes are still expected to be affordable – a sensitive point after Crest Nicholson asked to change the arrangements for affordable homes on a site in Davigdor Road recently.
Mr Starr scotched rumours that Crest would reduce the community and performance space – again a sensitive point with the loss of the public performance area at Hove Town Hall.
If the project runs to time, it should be completed by the end of 2020.
Valerie Paynter is realistic about the precedents set by the Karis scheme, including the district valuer’s assessment that it was “borderline unviable”.
The council will save money from maintaining the current swimming pool and leisure centre and the building that houses them.
She said: “The entire scheme is seriously overwhelming. But … this time (the council) is putting some money into the scheme too so the public is owed a much greater say in what is going to happen.”
The planning belief from the turn of the century was not changed/updated when the redevelopment competition was advertised and I have yet to hear a single (non-politician) word of praise for that.
There should have been a public consultation on what is NOW required there.
Oops! Planning BRIEF!
give it a rest
Completed by the end of 2020… is that the planning process or the actual building of the complex? Planning and consultation will take forever…
We local residents will not let this development happen.Trust me.Bath Court/Benham/Spa/St Aubyns/Courtney/Hove st/Kingsway/St Catherine’s terrace/Sussex Rd etc etc.No one is interested in Star and his plans for a 1960’s concrete block of flats.A state of the art leisure centre is needed a concrete mess is not.What is the matter with Brighton Council?.Suggest they drop the idea as there will be so many objections covering all legal points.Professionals will be hired by the residents. It will just be another loss of millions to the taxpayer.Just like last time.
For the Karis attempt saveHOVE got 2,000 petition signatures against it before it was even a planning application, after Policy & Resources gave the go-ahead for them to do the job and OK’d their huge towers and overdevelopment of the site.
In 2003 the site was declared a tall building node – no upper limit – in a policy document which is still the official council policy document The Local Plan policy which was the Planning Brief then, is the planning brief NOW too. The Govt NPPF reduced controls with “presumption in favour of development”…blah, blah…
The content for the leisure centre and all that housing were not chosen by Starr. They are council policy and anyone tendering for the redevelopment had to tender for the content dictated by BHCC.
The Karis attempt got planning consent for over 750 flats. By one LibDem vote supporting the Labour Administration. A change of Administration after the March decision saw Tory refusal to take £10,000 worth of QC advice, paid for by the Regency Society, for fear of being sued by Karis. So the planning committee agreed the as yet unsigned s106 agreement, which was then signed and planning consent finalised and delivered.
What legal points do you imagine can be conjured now, with that kind of precedent and all those policies carried forward without any fuss from all those in the addresses you cite and no political will from any political quarter?
Starr is as trapped by the past and trussed-up present as residents, frankly. Cut the garment according to the cloth – or not at all.
There is only one reason why this may not go ahead….financial viability from Crest Nicholson’s greedy perspective. The planning brief is out of date and the architecture less than it could be. We don’t need swanking, but we need better.
Starr is not your enemy. Choose a better target for your wrath. If it had not been him getting the council interested in re-tendering, it would have happened anyway and the exact same collossus would have come along from someone else.
You may know of the consent before Christmas for an overwhelmingly unsuitable and intrusive set of 3 towers for the Anston House site overlooking (and which will throw the Listed Preston Park’s rose garden into shade)and the consent for the Texaco site too. The residents in all the addresses you cite had an opportunity to do the necessary to prevent the Texaco consent from happening. It didn’t happen. People need to do a lot more work than they are willing to bother to do which is needed to augment and inform anything a planning consultant could do. Consultants, like lawyers, just work with policy and laws. Local knowledge and evidence gathering is something which residents cannot but DO shirk, until its too late.
Know thine enemy.