Everyone if familiar with the Bennett Cottage saga which looks set to run and run, and just when you thought things couldn’t get worse another similar application for just down the road has been slapped in. The design is not dissimilar i.e. Space Age and it is destined to be placed on the Mayfield School site on the corner of Mayfield Road and David Lane in the heart of the Mayfield Valley.
The school, which started life as Fulwood Board School, is currently being converted into three housing units and the developer now wishes to add an extra unit to the rear of Unit 3 which will be a guest house, garage and office for his own use.
A shed, toilet block and WWII bomb shelter are to be demolished although such is the feeling in the Valley that he may well need to retain the bomb shelter. It is unbelievable that anyone could submit such a scheme in such a design and it is obviously a follow-on from the Bennett Cottage proposals or should we say try-on.
The Conservation Advisory Group felt that the scheme was ‘not what it purported to be and it would be damaging to what was a precious and increasingly vulnerable landscape’. As it is to be clad in a matt black powder cement coating then that says it all. Further comments were that ‘the development would have an adverse impact on the long views, by reason of its siting and bulk and that it would be an intrusion into the Mayfield Valley’.
The original conversion of the disused school was initially welcomed but this attempt to put some icing on his cake by the developer will cause much resentment in the Valley if he succeeds.