The Lea Castle Village is a residential led mixed-use development centred on the former Lea Castle Hospital site to the north-east of Kidderminster in Wyre Forest District Council (WFDC).
The site is broadly split into two areas – a core site and a wider site.
The core site, now under construction, was identified in the WFDC Adopted Local Plan for new housing, employment and sports facilities. The wider site is a draft allocation in the Wyre Forest Submission Local Plan and has recently been considered by the Local Plan Inspector as part of the Local Plan Examination. It is anticipated that the Local Plan will be adopted in Spring 2022. The outline planning application for the wider site would not be determined by the Council until the Local Plan has been adopted.
As a responsible landowner, Homes England has a positive role to play in bringing this previously developed site back into use and assisting the Council in meeting its needs for new housing and for employment land.
Homes England submitted an outline planning application for up to 600 new dwellings and up to 3,500 square metres of employment floorspace on the core site in March 2017. The application was then approved at a planning committee on 21 November 2018 and outline planning permission was granted on 27 June 2019 for:
Now under construction, the core site covers approximately 43.24ha of now cleared former hospital buildings, as well as significant woodland belts that originally screened the former hospital buildings from the surrounding area. There are also existing sports pitches.
Approval for access arrangements include a main access point from Park Gate Road, secondary access from The Crescent and limited access to a small number of properties from Axborough Lane.
The wider site is made up of parcels of land to the north, east and west of the core site. The site is an allocation in the emerging Wyre Forest District Local Plan that is currently the subject of an Examination in Public, having been submitted to the Secretary of State for Examination on 30 April 2020. Work is currently underway to prepare an outline planning application for the wider site areas.
The wider site proposals currently include:
For ease of download, our 'Vision prompts and Plan' document is split into 2 parts as follows:
Our 'Developing the Vision' document is also split into sections to enable easier download:
Click to open a standalone PDF of the Draft Framework Masterplan. Please note that you may need to select 'fit to page' if you to choose to print this.
