Changes have been made to huge development of hundreds of flats at Broad Street Mall that is moving ahead.
The mall owners, AEW, and development partners McLaren Living are moving forward with a project add 643 apartments to the rear of the mall.
While the project was approved by Reading Borough Council’s planning applications committee in April, a change has been since then.
The shopping mall is currently accessed by car from two locations: a slip road on the Inner Distribution Road (IDR) and Castle Street.
The developers asked for the option for the access to be from the IDR only due to a possible conflict over land ownership.
The change in the access to the mall required permission from councillors.
A report by council planning officer Richard Eatough explained: “The applicant has proposed that should negotiations with the third party landowner not be successful that the access to the multi storey car park be taken solely from the slip road located along the IDR to the west of the Broad Street Mall.”
There is the possibility that access via Castle Street may be limited in the future, which is why the developers have asked for an optional change to the access.
Mr Eatough added that no objections had been received in a public consultation into the adjustment.
Furthermore, he judged that the change would result in negligible increases in traffic flow, therefore it was not anticipated that it would have harmful impacts in terms of noise and air quality.
The closest properties to the IDR entrance are the Queens Court apartments, the Pentahotel and terraced homes in Howard Street.
Micky Leng (Labour, Whitley), lead councillor for planning said: “In simple terms, we’ve got a route, and there’s an area of it which is owned by somebody else, which is a piece of ransom land.
“To prevent leverage and ransom, they want an alternative route to help with their negotiations and more importantly for the committee, it’s to help get on with the Broad Street Mall.
Meanwhile councillor Jan Gavin (Labour, Caversham) asked officers to produce diagrams of such access changes in the future to make them clearer.
The change was unanimously approved by the council’s planning applications committee on Wednesday, October 8.
You can view the approved application by typing reference PL/24/0173 into the council’s planning portal.
The council’s policy committee decided to sell the mall car park to the developers last month.
The amount of parking spaces on site will reduce from 720 spaces to circa 330 publicly available spaces.
