Will the Water Gardens car parks be browned off?
- Dacorum Council and housebuilders Hill Group are advertising the Water Gardens car parks as a ‘brownfield opportunity’
- Does this matter?
- Yes – Government policy strongly favours development on brownfield sites. The Hub will need more parking.
- If the Water Gardens car parks are put into the ‘brownfield’ category, planning permission for housing is very likely to be given
- But national experts the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) have pointed out that with policy and target mechanisms implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s, the consensus was that :
- ‘much residential development output on brownfield land was of poor quality.
- ‘these approaches allowed the over-development of high-density, monolithic developments comprised largely of small one- and two-bedroom flats.’
- ‘The high-rise, high-density nature of many of the redevelopments raised concerns over ‘town cramming’.
- ‘Many developments provided inadequate public space and amenities, put too much pressure on existing services and design was out of keeping with the character of neighbourhoods.’
- It may be that lessons have been learned since.
- But on the other hand recent governments have encouraged brownfield building even more.
- This is the link to the CPRE report – see section 1.2:
https://www.cpre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Better_Brownfield_web.pdf