Revealed: The major plans to demolish city tax office to build hundreds of homes
PLANS to knock down former tax offices and build hundreds of homes in a Cardiff suburb have been revealed.
Homes, flats, business units, retirement flats and a care home are all planned for the site of the tax offices in Llanishen.
For decades it has been home to the HMRC tax offices which has now moved to new offices in Central Square in the city centre.
Developer Cannon is proposing to develop the brownfield site once the lease has expired.
The plans for the Ty Glas development include:
■ knocking down all buildings on-site including the two towers;
■ up to 250 residential dwellings;
■ up to 70 retirement apartmentsA care home facility with 70 beds;
■ almost 1,900 sq ft of employment floorspace potentially for offices;
■ up to 600 sq m of community uses that could accommodate a doctors surgery, nursery or dentist; and
■ open space in the form of a “river corridor”, a central green space that will include a local area of play and a separate park.
The developers are now applying for outline planning permission from Cardiff Council.
The development would provide a mix of housing tenures, types and sizes including apartments, houses and townhouses.
The developer said the application has “flexibility” in terms of the standard homes, which will range from two to five bedrooms, and will reflect the housing market at the time.
The flats would be a mix of one and two bed units. Affordable housing will also be included.
In the northeast corner of the site, an apartment block of up to 70 retirement apartments would be built.
The exact size of the flats has not been decided. The apartments will only be available to people over a certain age.
In the south of the site, a care home is proposed, made up of 70 bedrooms. The developer proposes to have separate access to the home, shared with the business units off Parc Ty Glas.
Fronting Parc Ty Glas, the developer wants to build “employment units” over two storeys with up to 1,858 sqm of floor space.
Again the exact nature of who will fill the units is “flexible”. The developer is applying for office use and research and development use.
It said the units could be used as a workshop or a “co-working hub”.
Up to 600 sq m of “flexible community uses” is also planned. This could include a doctor’s surgery, nursery or dentist on the ground, and potentially first floor, of an apartment block facing the access road off Parc Ty Glas.
The developer wants to build a walkway/cycle path from the north west corner to the south west corner of the site. It would run alongside the existing stream.
Open space would be included in the middle of the site, and a “pocket park” in the south which would “retain existing trees where possible”.
The perimeter fence would be removed and pedestrian and cyclist connections through the site would be built.
The developer claimed traffic in the area could actually decrease following the new plans.
One of the documents submitted by Lichfields, a planning consultancy firm, states: “The traffic effect from the proposed development forecasts that there will be a reduction in trips compared with the existing site, if the site was fully occupied in its current capacity and existing use as primarily office space.
“The net change is forecast to be up to minus 460 two-way trips per day.
“Furthermore, there would be no impact in excess of 5% on the local highway network and all the site access points show they have capacity to accommodate the new development.”
Demolition of the buildings, which would be carried out in phases, has previously been reported to cost more than £14m.
The cost is down to the “sheer size of the buildings, the high amount of asbestos in the buildings and the contamination in the ground because it used to be part of the site of a Royal Ordnance Factory”.
Plans show that Ty Glas Road would be the “primary” road used for the demolition workers and vehicles.
The buildings are currently leased to HMRC with the lease set to end this year.
A number of buildings on the site have already been empty for several years, including thousands of feet of floorspace in Gleider House which has been empty since 2001.
Formal planning application has not yet been submitted, and all documents are currently drafts.
According to documents by the developer, the council’s pre-application response said the “principle of a residential-led mixed use scheme, incorporating an element of B use class employment uses to offset the loss of a primary protected employment site to alternative uses, and with retail use limited to the A1/A3 uses located on the ground floor of Gleider House, would be considered acceptable”.
A public consultation on the new plans has been opened.
Part of the site was once home to the Royal Ordnance Factory. In 1940, a huge factory opened where more than 20,000 people were employed to build guns and other weapons for the Second World War.
In 1941, the RAF established a base on the nearby field to train air cadets with gliders, which is where Gleider House and Glider field got their names from.
By 1960, the factory switched to make parts for the nuclear weapons programme. Production stopped in February 1997. Gleider House was built in 1968.