Great Plans & Anxiety
Great Plans & Anxiety
We’ve put in our fair share of planning applications before now for some minor alterations to our homes over the years but that said, having spent so long trying to buy the hall, I should probably have known better than to think the planning application would be straightforward.
I wanted to get a proper handle on the do’s and dont’s for a building like this, so I decided to book the morning off work and have a 90 minute drive to Skipton for a chat with the duty planning officer. This is a drop-in service, so it wasn’t possible to make an appointment but luckily I scrape into the building just as things are opening and find the duty officer for a chat.
Let’s just say…it didn’t go well!
With the keys in hand we’ve had plenty of time to think about the technical challenges and what we want to do with the place. Overall, I think we have a fairly good grip on the how-to’s but after finding out Adam has a dust allergy (..and learning cleaners aren’t provided on the NHS), we’ve realised we need to make sure the build is to a slightly higher spec than we originally had in mind. The rustic bolt-hole in the country side needs to be something we can clean properly and given our daughter Emily is now 3 (and is into everything), it needs to be safe.
I hadn’t anticipated having to include health issues into the design so depending upon what the planners have to say, we might need to go back to the drawing board. Given almost everything I suggest for the building seems to get a frosty response, it feels like the stakes and the pressure has just gone up a notch.
However, having used up my hour, I come away with some knowledge, a (very) long list of issues and a dark, foreboding feeling in the pit of my stomach! I knew this was going to take a bit of thinking about but even I’m surprised by the number of ideas which simply get shot down because of the area it’s in or the lack of land. We are in the Forrest of Bowland AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) so have to get approval of the local AONB planner, the parish council who sold us the property need to approve the conversion idea, the highways agency needs to approve the build in case it impacts on the local roads, the environment agency needs to approve it as it is in a projected flood zone, we need to check for the presence of protected species nesting, the closest neighbours are 100m away but still need to approve of it, the planning officer needs to back it, the local councillors need to back it and it needs to be to a specification which doesn’t fall into the residential status.
..but apart from that!
We did argue with the land registry that there is an existing cobble pathway stretching to the road at the front of the building so at some point, it was part of the building but it doesn’t get us anywhere and the building was registered without it . Undeterred, we rework the draft planning application and submit it (Craven DC Ref 18/2015/16278) with a view to creating a Camping Barn, albeit to a slightly higher spec than you might otherwise see.
The payment is taken and all we can do now is wait.