Project: Case Study: Wixam Park – Design & Access Statement

Whilst we were preparing the planning application for Wixam Park, part of our remit was to prepare both the planning statement and to input into the written part of the design and access statement, working in partnership with the urban design team at David Lock Associates.

The planning statement was a separate document and it looked at the local and national policy context. It documented the historical activity on the site including the extensive public consultation that we had undertaken. It also looked at the designations and the protections around the site and summarised the technical process that the application had gone through. It sought to demonstrate how robust the application was. We also did a thorough assessment of policy and we looked at the market conditions at the time including how the neighbouring sites were coming forward. Wixam Park was subject to a phasing restriction in the original policy and so we demonstrated how the landowners had met with that.

The second document that we worked on was the Design and Access statement – we took a different approach here: Design and Access Statements can often be very extensive, so we revisited the guidance for D&A Statements which sought to keep it brief and punchy.

• We effectively told the story of how the site was conceived
• how it would be coming forward
• what the restrictions were
• what should be considered as the application came forward from a design perspective
• we set out a series of parameters including character areas and key green spaces

The D&A statement used imagery prepared by DLA, and it also drew on key themes that were coming out of the biodiversity green infrastructure strategy. It sought to put together different components of the scheme that was being applied for. This was submitted with the outline planning application  and was praised by Central Bedfordshire Council as being a very accessible document.