A date has been set for the council’s Planning Committee to decide whether to approve plans for a new King Alfred swimming pool and leisure centre.
Brighton and Hove City Council has scheduled an extra Planning Committee meeting to discuss the £65 million scheme at Hove Town Hall on Wednesday 29 July.
The council is in the process of preparing the ground to build a replacement seafront leisure centre in Kingsway, Hove.
The planning application includes new swimming pools and sports facilities on the part of the site occupied by the car park and former ten-pin bowling alley.
Six hundred comments have been left on the council’s website – 534 objections, 45 in support and others that are either mixed or neutral.
The building design has been described as “blocky” and families have criticised the lack of a lagoon-style leisure pool.
Some comments welcome the scheme despite reservations about the design and loss of facilities while others want the council to refurbish the existing 1930s building.
The Brighton Society has objected, raising concerns about the finances, size and impact on heritage of a site “within the setting” of the Old Hove, Pembroke and Princes and Cliftonville Conservation Areas.
The society said: “It is not ‘cutting edge’ or ‘state of the art’, rather a mimic of art deco at the front (the beach side) and overwhelming and unwelcoming blank walls on the west and north sides.
“The east side will face what appears to be six tower blocks. For the applicant to add that ‘the proposed design and layout has been carefully and efficiently designed with reference to the existing character of the surrounding area’ is an affront to local residents and heritage groups.”
The chair of the Dolphins Disabled Swimming Club wrote to support the plans, saying: “The current facilities and amenities at (the King Alfred) have helped many of our members.
“But the building is old, frail and experiencing many challenges with pool and shower temperatures, accessibility for our more severely disabled members and general hygiene issues with showers and drains.
“I have been involved with the consultation and development planning meetings and believe that the new development will provide much-improved services compared to what the current complex can even with refurbishing, as some people are suggesting.”
The extra Planning Committee meeting is scheduled to start at 2pm on Wednesday 29 July.
No comment from Councillor Alan Robins on his “world beating” and “iconic” new £65m KALC hub leisure centre plans?
It seems the Dolphins Disabled Swimming club only supported the new KALC plans until they actually studied them in detail as they subsequently objected on 26/05/26.
“Comments for Planning Application BH2026/00490
Application Summary
Application Number: BH2026/00490
Address: King Alfred Leisure Centre (part) And Public Car Park And Lawn West Of Hove Street
Kingsway, Hove BN3 2WW
Proposal: Redevelopment of western part of existing leisure centre and public car park to provide
new leisure centre (F2 use) to include: swimming pools, sports hall, gym/fitness suite, childrens
soft play, event spaces, cafe and undercroft car park accessed from Hove Street. Associated hard
and soft landscaping, public realm works and highway infrastructure. Relocation of existing
seafront shelter. Provision of temporary public car park on part of lawn to west of Hove Street
during construction (2 years).
Case Officer: Maria Seale
Customer Details
Name: Not Available
Address: Not Available
Comment Details
Commenter Type: Organisations
Stance: Customer objects to the Planning Application
Comment Reasons:
– Poor design
Comment: I was involved in the consultation process by the KA Development Team and
Architecys. They attended Dolphins Disabled Swimming Club Session to understand our club
members’ vastly varied needs due to a wide spectrum of disabilities due to simple old age to
strokes, accidents, musculoskeletal surgeries, etc. and gave me the assurances the access to the
pool will be designed to meet the needs. I now find they listened but did not hear, they came to
see but totally ignored the member’ disabilities and needs. Instead of the walk in ramp access to
the pool they have designed in roman steps which are not suitable for those who can hardly lift
their feet. The steps are not suitable for pool wheelchairs for access. One Disabled pod instead of
the ramp means only one person can be lowered at a time which will cause lost time for the
session’s activities. The number of Disabled parking bays are not enough from what I can see
from the plans. For these reasons, while I support the new building for KA, I object to the proposed
plans on behalf of Dolphins Disabled Swimming Club”
Other objections to the KALC planning application of note, notwithstanding 92% of the public.
CAG – Conservation Advisory Group
Save Britain’s Heritage
Brighton Society
Regency Society
Hove Civic Society
East Sussex County Council
It would be a dereliction of public duty to plunge ahead with so many issues still outstanding. And NOT learning any lessons from the i360 disaster, which BHCC allegedly commissioned an expensive report at taxpayer’s expense to learn from.
Misleading. It appears that multiple members of Dolphins have commented, each providing their own thoughts on the design.
Your misleading the public, your a labour member Ben. Closely associated with this administration. Your not a born and raised brightonian your compromised.
You can evidentially see this is the case on the planning portal, where several comments have been made by various people, stating they are members of the Dolphins, on the first several pages of comments.
What a strange, and easily disputable thing to claim?
https://share.google/2KEx35XZygta3kkps
Spot the Labour Council apologist! (It ain’t difficult)
I haven’t provided an opinion on this occasion.
Personally, I find the consultee comments the most interesting parts of feedback. Specifically, I was reading the Urban Design comments; which suggest amendments to the design. Amendments to the design seem to the common thread in the articulated feedback more generally, and echoed in some of the more constructive conversations I’ve had with individuals on here, too.
https://share.google/2KEx35XZygta3kkps
what is this a link to?
If you just post a link with zero explanation people will just think it’s spam and avoid it.
Lesley (Also known as Rupert or James – you can follow the gravatar hash to ID people across names), likes to post messages eluding to a Conservative candidate from a by-election called Benjamin Franks.
He shared an AI sycophantic response previously that suggested I could be this person, and has believed it ever since. This link appears to have a collection of Benjamin Frank photos. It’s extremely concerning, and clearly not the actions of a mentally stable individual.
A half-baked, overpriced plan by a compromised closed shop council on a sticky wicket who have left the manifesto they were elected on far behind and only care about the towerblocks they won’t discuss. It is clear they don’t give a gnat’s chuff about whatever shipping container undersized leisure hub results from this charade. They just want to get it through as quickly as possible before their administration falls next May.
Really hope the plans yet approved fingers crossed
King Alfred was only good when it had the 3 water slides. Every other pool in Brighton and hove has old people lane swimming which are subsidised by the young tax payer. Little kids pools are only good till about 3 years old. The government is about to ban social media so there is going to be a necessity to entertain the core teenage years. This needs a complete rethink with progressive youth in mind.
Hopefully affordable and diverse
Plans look great, fingers crossed the planners ignore the faux outrage whipped up by the social media click-bate grifters
What plans have you been looking at? 57% less leisure space with a £65m price tag for a debt-ridden city is not a good plan, no matter what your views on the actual look of the new hub, which are just artist’s impressions, possibly AI, which is even less accurate. In reality most of the light would also be blocked out by the tower blocks around it, meaning windows would have to be blocked or obscured to prevent overlooking issues.
Thanks for demonstrating my point -everything you’ve said is a lie or pure speculation. What are your motives I wonder? The usable space in the proposal is larger than what we have currently. As for the windows, the swimming pool faces the sea, not the proposed residential development, so the idea that these windows would be covered up is nonsense. Also, I don’t think you understand how debt works – so long as the income from the leisure centre covers the repayments then this is a perfectly normal (and acceptable) arrangement.
Putting the matter of cruddy design to one side, you are talking about a smaller leisure centre. Fewer activities, particularly community bookings with no Ballroom. Higher admission prices. Higher priced parking in the undercroft. Please show your mathematical calculations of how this is going to generate enough income to service the debt. More families will be driving their children to Splashpoint and K2 and spending their money there. They are already saying so, so the council are to be congratulated on coming up with a short-sighted scheme which will create more and longer resident vehicle journeys and lead to more money being spent outside of Brighton and Hove. Quality blue sky thinking.
That’s not quite how the council’s own figures describe it. The July 2024 cabinet paper says explicitly that the new facility’s income is expected to offset the financing costs ‘in part’ – not in full. The council’s own scrutiny papers confirm a base revenue funding gap of £890,000 per year even under the original, lower £47.4m cost assumption, before interest rate rises or the unconfirmed Homes England grant are factored in.
No updated figures have been published since the cost rose from £47.4m to £65m, so the actual current shortfall is unknown but almost certainly larger.
This isn’t unusual for a public leisure facility, most are subsidised because they deliver public health benefit rather than commercial return. But it’s a different arrangement from ‘income covers the repayments,’ and the council’s own documents say s
Whatever view you take on the merits, one fact should concern everyone -the council has already committed approximately £11.5 million, around 18% of the total £65 million budget, before the planning committee has met.
The first £5 million tranche was exhausted four months early. The council’s own cabinet paper acknowledged that if the project doesn’t proceed, this money ‘would not result in an asset’ and would need to be covered from reserves.
There have been 534 formal objections. Heritage bodies, the Brighton Society, the Regency Society and the Hove Civic Society all objecting. The council’s own audit committee rating the project high risk. The financial model not updated since the budget rose 37% from £47.4m to £65m.
Committing 18% of a major project budget before planning is determined, against this level of documented concern, is exactly the kind of decision the i360 inquiry was supposed to prevent the council from repeating.
You have to appreciate the nuance that architectural designs costs money, alongside the various mandatory reports, it’s perfectly natural to commit a large portion of the budget before planning is determined, because that work is how planning passes determination. It is typical and normal.
Let’s face it Benjamin, a group of 6th formers on a design and technology course could have come up with better, more pertinent plans. The plans are not fit for purpose and lack ambition and capacity. Where has the civic pride gone?
Performative aspects aside, you can certainly argue for a more ambitious design, absolutely. But then you’ll hear more complaints about the increased cost that would bring; we’re already hearing that from the site location. There’s a balance between being aspirational and pragmatic realities and limitations. Civic pride sounds good, but falls apart when it’s tested in that way.
However, in compromise, revisions of plans and designs should happen, in my opinion, to tweak and make better. Revisions! Like I said, there are some decent points made. Unfortunately, much gets drowned out by loud voices; I can think of a few examples.
Do you buy a cheap tools to get a short-term fix or a good one that will last a lifetime and beyond. The King Alfred is near 100 years old and talk about replacing it has been happening since the 1970’s that I know of. This is such a great opportunity to put the City on the worldwide map. It’s a legacy project and deserves proper funding and design. The benefits of perhaps a 50m pool and diving area could attract events and mean income and investment for the local economy. We cannot afford to let these diminished plans to go forward as they stand. If that means a pound a week on my Council Tax, so be it. I am too old and decrepit to gain the benefit but investing in future generations is a must if we want Society to flourish and survive.
And there’s the balance, because you also have to consider the rest of the cities needs and wants. If you were to put everything into one superproject as it were, nothing else can be afforded for several years. It also has to make sense on a financial sense. The ROI needs to balance over a reasonable time period. It’s why there’s a lot of uproar about the prospect of 50 year mortgages.
Benjamin, I realise that major capital works are probably not your area of expertise, but this isn’t actually right.
Standard public sector capital governance, including the Treasury Green Book and most local authority capital frameworks, explicitly treats committing significant capital before planning permission as a key risk to be minimised, not a normal feature of the process.
Design fees, surveys, and the work needed to prepare a planning application are normal and expected before determination, that’s typically in the region of 5–8% of total budget. What isn’t normal is what’s happened here -physical, irreversible enabling works, including demolishing the bowling alley, running well ahead of permission, taking the committed total to roughly 18% of the £65m budget.
The council’s own July 2024 cabinet paper makes the point itself – if the project doesn’t proceed, that money ‘would not result in an asset’ and would need to be covered from reserves. That’s precisely the risk capital governance frameworks are designed to avoid, committing public money on the assumption that an outcome is settled before it actually is.
It also creates exactly the sunk cost dynamic that good governance is meant to prevent. The more that’s spent before a decision is made, the harder it becomes for anyone, officers, committee members, even the public, to treat that decision as genuinely open. That’s not a comment on individual integrity, it’s just how sunk cost and political pressure work, and it’s precisely why the sequencing matters.
£65 mill? wtf do we trust the procurement, the timeless and the delivery body to do this with OUR £65 mill of taxes.
Looking at the critical comments reminds me once again why it is so hard and expensive to get public projects done in Brighton. Such is the times we live in where it is so easy to express grievances without doing the hard work of bridge building and compromise. Why don’t the critics support the multiple decade process of trying to come up with some decent replacement for a very aged and no longer fit for purpose leisure centre and pool?
I so hope the council looks beyond the many armchair critics and move ahead with this very decent proposal. Of course it’s not going to satisfy every residents needs, but as a multiple decade user of the pool and facility I am very excited the city may finally create a very good enough replacement. If this gets stopped I can’t imagine how long it will take to develop an alternative that will still never be good enough for the many fighting against most any collective sense of progress.
I agree. We can point to the choice of location as an excellent example to your point, as a cheaper location had been identified, but resident consultation was very clear that they wanted the site to remain where it was, at the increased cost.
I think you’re right that it will never be everything for everyone, and whilst that’s a nice ideal, pragmatically that’ll unlikely to ever be achieved. On balance though, there has been several comments and thoughtful criticisms that should be incorporated into a design consideration alongside amendments, where possible.
While there are some fair concerns about the reduction in pool leisure area for children, the objections to the planning application are full of moronic nimby nonsense from people who seem to think its possible to retrofit a leisure centre built in the 1930s.. obviously a new build leisure centre is needed, similar to those built all over the country… keeping the existing King Alfred in operation makes sense while the new one is built… selling the existing site for flats to fund the new leisure centre makes sense as well. It will be a brownfield site in an urban location, there is a housing crisis and homes are needed. I’m an architect and think the design looks great, there is only so much you can do with the back of a sports hall and leisure facility
No genuine architect would say that design is ‘great’! More like a far east Autocad farm job. And FYI, it’s not a brownfield ‘site’. It’s the biggest and best-used affordable leisure centre in Brighton and Hove and it belongs to us, the residents. Jacob Taylor can take his oversized asset-stripping ego somewhere it might be welcome. Anyone know how he got made a second Deputy Council Leader and put in charge of a £1bn city budget after only three weeks as a first time Councillor? A big story is waiting to be told.
Oh wow, I haven’t seen a No True Scotsman argument for a while.
Are you an out of work architect perchance? lol
Benjamin, on the site choice point: residents weren’t actually asked which site they preferred. The council’s own FOI response confirmed this directly: ‘the questionnaire did not ask respondents for a preferred site.’ What it asked was whether people would personally use a facility at each location which is a usage question, not a preference question, and one that was always going to favour the site closer to where existing users already live and travel.
The council’s own July 2024 cabinet paper acknowledges this skew directly – ‘current users and those living close to the existing facility represented the largest group of respondents… the overall results are therefore strongly influenced by their views.’ The same paper confirms the sample was unrepresentative in other ways too, younger people aged 18 to 34 make up 28% of the city’s population but only 10.5% of respondents, and minority ethnic groups were also significantly underrepresented. There’s no breakdown by family status, but the skew toward existing, often older, nearby users is acknowledged by the council itself.