While this is outside the immediate town centre area of Havant, this is a new planning application that will concern many residents of the Havant area. For those of us who have lived in the town for many years, the site is the former Bedhampton Fruit Farm, home of the PYO Strawberry fields that our kids used to love. In recent years, fruit farming has given way to the occasional car boot sale, but the site nevertheless represents the last remnant of the green gap between Havant and Farlington.
The satellite image below shows the location of the site at the junction the A27 and the A3(M), with the ‘Rusty Cutter’ ‘Beefeater’ at the top right. The triangular site of new housing in the top centre of this picture is the ‘One-Eight-Zero’ development of detached houses which have now almost all sold in the price range of £850K to £1M. Barratts (trading as ‘Dennis Wilson Homes’) have ‘assured’ their buyers that the green field immediately to the south west, also owned by them, will be kept as green space.
Those same residents will now have found that the land south of the old A27, the former Strawberry Fields, is now the subject of another Barratt’s planning application for 320 houses and a 66 bed care home.
In the outline plan, below, you can see the proposed position of the 320 dwellings, together with the 66 bed Care Home located at the north west corner of the site.
For those of us who sometimes travel on the A2030 Havant Road – the old A27 between Bedhampton and Farlington – the peak time traffic issues with the ‘Rusty Cutter’ roundabout will be well known. Adding the traffic from a further 320 dwellings, along with service and visitor traffic to the care home, and we are simply exacerbating local traffic issues without providing a solution.
Please take a look at this planning application read the associated documents and comments, and if you have your own comments to make, please note the closing date of June 19th.
Update: June 6th 2018
Havant Civic Society has made its own representation which can be viewed by taking this link.
Havant Civic Society 