BRIGHTER DAYS AHEAD will 'localism' be the key to better planning?
Flanked by the South Downs National Park and the open sea, a city of elegant Regency terraces, squares and crescents and an extraordinary Royal Pavilion, Brighton and Hove has much to be admired and envied.
But for over fifty years the city's planners have allowed it to be disfigured by some truly dreadful buildings. In a prime central seafront location, the Brighton Centre and adjacent Odeon cinema are drab windowless structures, entirely inappropriate for the seafront. A few streets back, a 28-storey inspiration-free concrete apartment block known as Sussex Heights provides wonderful panoramas for a few hundred residents, but only at the cost of wrecking the outlooks of thousands of others.
At the eastern end of the city what should have been one of the world's finest marinas is blighted by a chaos of hangar-like structures, ugly car parks and a tangle of concrete ramps, as well as by Brunswick's plans to concrete over part of the harbour and use it as a building site for 1960s style tower-blocks, rising to 42 storeys. Although the Brunswick scheme was given planning permission years ago, substantive work on it has not started.
The savebrighton campaign was founded in 2007 in an attempt to persuade the council that better planning policies were required. We spent our first two years fighting a massively unpopular proposal by developers Explore Living to fill the remaining space at the west end of the Marina with further tower blocks. The scheme was recommended for approval by council planning officers but savebrighton then joined forces with local residents associations to mount a massive campaign against it. It was finally turned down by councillors. The developers appealed, but to no avail. After a public inquiry, it was finally turned down by the Secretary of State.
In the spirit of localism being promoted by the new government we are hoping that local people's views will be taken into account by planning officers earlier in the process next time.
