New Sports Hall for Badminton School
CSJ Planning are delighted to have secured planning consent on behalf of Badminton School, Bristol, for the construction of a new school sports hall. Given the site’s location within a Conservation Area, the design of the sports hall was of paramount importance in order to ensure that the legal requirement to preserve or enhance the Conservation Area was satisfied. The design of the consented sports hall goes far beyond the norm for such a building and incorporates a green sedum roof, a floor to ridge living green trellis and a focus on using timber cladding and natural stone. In order to ensure that the proposal delivers a BREEAM Excellent rating and a reduction in carbon emissions in accordance with local planning policies, PV panels will be located on the roof space of an existing, adjacent school building. Furthermore, CSJ Planning demonstrated to Bristol City Council that the location of the hall on three tennis courts within the school’s grounds was the most appropriate, despite its designation as Local Open Space. CSJ prepared a robust justification to support the proposed location, ruling out other prospective sites within the school’s ground on matters relating to residential amenity and potential impacts on the setting of listed buildings within the demise of the school. In order to overcome the loss of the Designated Open Space, CSJ successfully argued that although the site is designated as Open Space and thus considered to be of community benefit, the site is already in a sporting use and the sports hall would deliver a significant improvement on the existing sporting facilities and in turn an improvement to the local community given that the sports hall will be available for use by local community and sporting groups in arrangement with Badminton School. Andrew Beard (Director) said “It was very satisfying to secure this consent and it shows the value of the planning agents role of partnership and dialogue to turn a potential refusal to a delegated approval”.
