PLANNING chiefs have given the green light for a six storey apartment block in Warrington’s Palmyra Square Conservation Area.
The scheme, approved by Warrington Borough Council’s development management committee, involves the demolition of the former Holy Trinity church vicarage.
Currently vacant and boarded up, the vicarage is a two-storey building.
The apartment block will comprise 23 apartments, 17 one-bedroomed and six two-bedroomed. All will be for affordable housing on a rent-to-buy basis.
It is not the firs time proposals have been put forward to demolish the old vicarage.
A plan to replace it with a five-storey building with a restaurant at ground floor level and 11 apartments above was refused in 2011.
Two other schemes involving replacing the vicarage with apartments were withdrawn in 2018 and 2019.
But now a scheme has been approved – despite objections based on loss of amenity for occupiers of nearby buildings and the likelihood of increased parking problems enflaming existing tensions between local residents and businesses.
Planning officers recommended the plan be approved.
They said the design of the new building was considered to be of a high quality causing less than significant harm to nearby heritage assets, that harm being outweighed by the public benefits of the scheme.
The existing vicarage building, viewed across Palmyra Square
