SOUTHBOROUGH HUB

At long last there is light at the end of the Southborough Hub tunnel. All four parties have now signed off the agreements and also, on 1 October, the £10 million contract with Baxalls to start construction was signed. The project is expected to take about 60 weeks, aiming for completion in early 2021. A small ceremony to launch construction will be held on site, in November.

TUNBRIDGE WELLS DRAFT LOCAL PLAN

Looking much further ahead, the Tunbridge Wells Borough Draft Local Plan devotes 540 pages to proposing a new planning strategy up to 2036, listing potential development sites and policies.

For Southborough, 15 pages (nos. 139-153) list four specific sites for development (Place Shaping Policies), with a further 10 unallocated sites shown on pages 539/540. The Strategy for Southborough includes 135-205 new dwellings on three sites, retention of the three existing public car parks and provision of public electric vehicle charging points.

The four Southborough sites are:

S01 Southborough Hub, referred to above, with 69 residential units in two blocks of flats, now in the final stages of construction

S02 Speldhurst Road former allotments on land between Bright Ridge and Speldhurst Road. Planning permission exists for 16 dwellings on this site.

S03 Land at Mabledon and Nightingale Farm, to the east of the A26, is allocated for a mixed- use scheme to include “land-based economic development and approximately 50-120 residential dwellings…with safe and acceptable access arrangements from the A26…and where required a secondary emergency access” (presumably on to Vauxhall Lane).

Development on this site above 50 dwellings will need to be justified and may not exceed 120 in the period up to 2036. Mention is made of provision for affordable housing, the need for landscape restoration and for the developer to agree to using the site as “an exemplar project”. This is because, like S04 below, the site is in the Green Belt and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

S04 Land at Mabledon House, most of which is within the Borough, but to the north of the House within Tonbridge Borough, on whose support this item is dependent.

The proposal is for “a luxury hotel up to a maximum of 200 rooms and leisure development with spa and conference facilities, set within a restored historic park and garden and wider attractive landscape”. There have been previous applications for a similar hotel development on this site which have not materialised.

Of these projects, the most contentious would be S03 on the site of Nightingale Farm. The main access would be on to the A26, just beyond its junction with the A21, and almost opposite the access to S04, Mabledon House, where traffic congestion at peak hours is common. Given the location, occupants of new housing on the site will essentially all be car users.

We encourage our members and local residents to have a close look at this proposed development in the Draft Local Plan and submit any comments by the deadline, Friday, 15th November.

For these reasons the Society will be stating its intention to look closely at the detail of proposals for this site as they emerge, in the period of the Pre-Submission Local Plan. Consultation on this is expected to take place August-September 2020. Following that, the Plan will have “Independent Examination” in May 2021, with a view to adoption in December that year – “subject to any significant modifications”.