Of course towers will change our town

I have watched with interest the first week of the second stage of hearings regarding the 2019 Borough Local Plan.

A major question put to the council by Louise Phillips, the inspector conducting the hearings, was: “Has Maidenhead’s capacity to accommodate the scale of growth, now proposed, been robustly tested in respect of its potential effects on issues including traffic/congestion; pressure on infrastructure; air quality; loss of green space; and the implications of high rise/high density development upon the character of the housing mix?”

The proposed plan is to build on allocated sites, 6,144 dwellings in Maidenhead out of a total of 8,296 for the whole borough, ie Maidenhead, Windsor and Ascot. This is a massive 74 per cent of the planned new dwellings.

However, more alarmingly for

Maidenhead is that the planned number of dwellings in the town centre is now 2,760, an increase of 1,300 dwellings from the 2018 Borough Local Plan.

To accommodate this huge increase the council is proposing a high rise/high density development in the town centre by building tower blocks up to 25 storeys.

The council states that they have elected high rise/high density to protect the greenbelt.

This is clearly not the case since they are proposing to build 2,600 dwellings on Maidenhead Golf Course (greenbelt) and on nearby land which is located on the edge of the town centre.

The council said they were confident that the proposed increase in density will not have a detrimental effect on the character of the town.

This is an unbelievable statement. Maidenhead is a market town and you do not have to be a planning expert to see that this will change completely the character of the town. The town centre is the heart of Maidenhead and the golf course is its green lung.

In summarising the discussion on development in Maidenhead, the Inspector asked: “What would be the alternative to putting everything into the town centre?

The alternative we’ve heard is greenbelt.”

I would like to suggest that possible alternatives include:

1.Build a satellite village on the outskirts of the town.

2.The latest projection of household growth for RBWM determined by the government in 2018 is noticeably less than the 2012 projections used by the council. Therefore, should the council consider building a smaller number of new homes, especially taking into account the devastating effect that high rise/high density dwellings would have on the town centre?

GEORGE MIDGLEY Walker Road Maidenhead