Shaviram’s plans for 402 Build-to-Rent homes, a 133-room hotel and an innovation centre on the edge of Oxford have been unanimously approved.
Oxford City Council’s planning committee supported the scheme for the former AC Neilson site at its December 13 meeting.
The developer, having already converted the former Neilson House office building on the 3.34-hectare site, south of the A40 London Road at Headington, to 134 flats under Permitted Development Rights, can now redevelop the land alongside the former office building.
The site, close to the Thornhill park & ride, is now known as Thornhill Park.
There will be 10 blocks of flats, ranging in height from three floors to six, a new four-storey hotel and a former lodge will be extended to form innovation space. Half the homes will be affordable.
The development is a scaled down version of the original proposals in which 456 homes were proposed and a 252-room hotel. The changes also mean reduced heights for most of the proposed buildings.
Cllr Alex Hollingsworth said: “The developers do need to be congratulated, as do our planning team, for a scheme which I certainly got quite a lot of correspondence from people living in Risinghurst about when it was initially proposed.
“I think the view was that it was perhaps slightly ambitious in scale. That paraphrases some of the more Anglo-Saxon comments I got to what is now, I think, rather a good scheme, given the constraints of the site and the challenges it faces.”
The team on the project includes JTP on masterplanning and architecture, Savills on planning and BMD on landscaping.
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