Double sided monopoles
These applications are usually for a 6m by 3m Board with a ten second colour change, set around 3m above ground level. While the application mood pitch may be Burberry the real world is usually McDonalds and KFC in quick rotation. They are pitched in locations with a high traffic count and the conceit is that vehicle drivers will look at the advertisement, not the road, so justifying the rate-card price to the advertiser, and putting the motorist into a “without due care and attention dilemma”. As such they may be argued to be morally bankrupt! Grounds for objection are usually more constrained however – amenity and traffic Safety. A Conservation Area often helps as grounds for refusal, so there are not yet many signs on Redland Green. Other Bristolians do have to put up with them exceeding their light luminance limits at night however, with the light carrying for miles, even if the message is lost, (and currently who is going to enforce this ?)
Planning application 26/11011/A was an interesting case in that it is sited in grass adjacent the newly improved Malago Road West end of Bedminster Green, at the foot of some new student towers. But the application pretends a lot of new and old residential buildings haven’t been built which would house receptors of the light as an amenity loss. Given bi-directional traffic, the proposal is double sided and thankfully Traffic Demand Management, our illustrious traffic people, are getting better at writing an objection letter with a sting on Highway safety. And that’s needed here as the industrial estate has 18m wide entrances for HGV articulated lorries rear wheel paths, a lot of humanity crossing these gaps on the pavement to and from Lidl and Screwfix, and, unusually, a lot of passing GWR railway traffic in line of sight with certain trees having been removed by Network Rail. It’s an awkward estate from which to re-join the carriageway, without ‘being in a bus lane’, a bad place to be as a van-driver in Bristol! Generally, Bristol City Council and local councillors don’t like these applications in principle (with a mention in the new Local Plan) so we are lending a shoulder in the direction of travel of our planning department.
The Society placed two objection letters and offered some photographs as well. The case officer wisely turned the application down in June.
But did I say they always appeal? Well they always appeal, because it is cheap. This is an area we find difficult as hitherto the applications can be very poorly drafted but now they can introduce new material and rebuttals of the objectors’ earlier comments and we cannot respond. Here a transport report has materialised within an appeal document of over fifty pages’ length, but there was none such in the application, where the whole planning statement took up under three pages.
So this is why we sometimes go the extra mile in the formal objection, in order our ideas are read by the Inspector as well as the Case Officer.
Appeal results awaited, September 2026.
Stephen Wickham
Comments submitted by the Civic Society