The Cabot Gate planning application 25/14053/P for a 28-storey tower housing 600 students has been approved at Planning Committee. It would have passed through Committee almost un-noticed apart from a stand made by Bristol Conservation Advisory Panel, Historic England and Bristol Civic Society, which generated strong press interest after the event.
You will certainly notice it if built however, as permitted in front of the Cabot Circus car park at the bottom of the M32. It stands on the site of the former Tollgate Tower eyesore that the earlier City administration and planning department spent many years and £8m getting rid of over twenty years ago. Memory is short. This building is nine stories taller.
This, the Society argues, undoes at a stroke fifty years of Bristol urban planning in regenerating the Portland and Brunswick Square Conservation Area (only fifty metres away).
Disturbingly the application team, privileged with an advanced committee briefing paper, argued in effect that so much damage has been done to the Bristol skyline in the past eight years of
permissions that there is no point in the councillors worrying about this one. The senior planners recommended approval.
Stephen Wickham