Bath could soon get a “new city quarter” with more than 450 homes built just over the river from Green Park Station.
The former Homebase site in Bath | Image © Craig Auckland / Fotohaus
Plans to build the homes on the 4.45-acre site of the old Homebase are set to go before the Bath & North East Somerset Council’s planning committee on 7th May for a decision on whether to grant planning permission.
Planning officers are recommending that the scheme be approved.
Developer HUB wants to build 454 homes on the site. Planning documents said the “Pines Way” development would create “new greened spaces for local people and much-needed housing for a growing younger population in a city suffering with a decreasing supply.”
275 homes on the site would be “built to rent”, and the remaining 179 would be “shared living”.
Shared living, also known as co-living, is a relatively new concept where residents have a self-contained living unit but have access to more shared amenities.
While it sounds similar to student accommodation, the flats will not be marketed to students. But the developers did not accept a condition to ban renting to students outright.
The homes would be spread across four blocks, ranging from four to six storeys in height, with landscaping on publicly accessible new streets between them.
The plans will include 1,126 square metres of retail or office floorspace, 51 car parking spaces, and 704 bicycle parking spaces. Buildings would use brick and sheet metal, which planning officers say are a “honest and grounded expression of the industrial heritage of the site.”
The former Homebase site forms part of the Sydenham Park allocation under Bath & North East Somerset Council’s local plan.
In their report going before the council’s planning committee on 7th May, the council’s planning officers said: “The vision for the Sydenham Park (SB7) allocation is to create a new city quarter, that responds to the residential development at [Bath Western Riverside] and represents a confident new stage in the evolution of the city.”
Before the Homebase building was constructed in the 1980s, the site had largely been railway sidings as it lies just across the river from Green Park Station which until the 1960s had been the terminus of the Mangotsfield and Bath Railway Line.
Today the station is a market place and the railway bridge which led to it is the entrance to the Sainsbury’s car park.
Planning permission had previously been granted in 2021 to build a 288-unit care complex on the site. Bath & North East Somerset Council rejected the plans but approval was won on appeal from the planning inspectorate, however the development never happened.
Councillors will vote on whether to grant planning permission for the plans at a meeting in the Brunswick/Braunschweig Room at the Guildhall in Bath at 11am on 7th May.
John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter
