This week Cheltenham Borough Council announced that it planned to convert empty space in the town centre to residential use to ‘maximise brownfield development’.
That’s welcome, but in truth it has been a long time coming.
For years now it has been clear that Cheltenham has far more retail space than it needs. We have one of the longest High Streets in Britain. Meanwhile, the principal demand is for housing. Young Cheltonians who want to build their futures here need homes.
The answer isn’t always to concrete over green spaces. All too often, local planners have eyed the unspoilt fields around the edge of Cheltenham as the easiest target for development. Hence the vast plans for housing in Uckington and the west of Cheltenham.
But they’re missing the extraordinary town centre potential that’s hiding in plain sight. So much of our brownfield capacity could be repurposed into vital accommodation.
Take North Place for example. In 2018, after much behind-the-scenes lobbying, the Government agreed with me to award £3 million to Cheltenham Borough Council to help fund new affordable homes on the site. No scheme was ever brought forward, the Council returned the money and the site remains undeveloped – a ‘grot spot visible from space’, as one local resident described it to me. What a missed opportunity.
As I have written in the Echo before, this inertia means our town is now sleep-walking into the ‘doughnut effect’ – where the town centre is hollowed out in favour of new suburban estates. It’s a phenomenon well understood in the USA, where cities like Detroit have been particularly afflicted. A recent academic study from Stanford University suggested that Covid has simply accelerated the process.
Time is running out to stop it happening in Cheltenham. Having announced this policy, the Council now needs to make urgent progress. That means focussing without delay on areas like lower Lower High Street, and working up a plan to assist willing shop-owners to ‘flip’ their properties using existing laws known as ‘permitted development rights’. In the last year, more than 10,000 properties elsewhere in the country were turned into homes in this way. Precious few in Cheltenham.
Cheltenham needs an energetic and visionary approach to provide homes, breathe life back into the town centre, and take pressure of precious green spaces. There’s no time to waste.
[Column first published in the Cheltenham Post]