Plans to replace the former Drews the Ironmongers building in Reading with 44 flats go before councillors on October 7 with a recommendation for approval.
Plans for the five to seven storey building on the 0.16-hectare site at the corner of Caversham Road and Northfield Road will be considered at Reading Borough Council’s meeting of the planning applications committee. The plans were first unveiled by site owners S2 Estates last year. There will be five affordable homes and a flexible commercial unit on the ground floor.
A breakdown of the flats reveals 17 one-bedroom properties, 24 with two bedrooms and three with three bedrooms.
The former malthouse building is opposite the site of Hermes’ proposed 620-flat Reading Metropolitan scheme which sits alongside Aviva Investors’ plans for up to 950 at Reading Station Shopping Park.
Image shows the proposed scheme with Hermes’s proposed Reading Metropolitan scheme (shown faintly), to the left.
,© Thames Tap No 228 (powered by ukpropertyforums.com).
Please rate this article out of five stars below. You can comment too, using the form at the bottom of the page.
And at the Bell Tower Community Association we’ll be opposing it – we have already made a written submission to the council and hope to speak at the planning committee. It’s almost twice as tall as anything on that side of Caversham Road, completely out of scale with the small Victorian housing in the area, and the council agreed to add it to the list of locally significant heritage assets only last February. The buildings are the oldest in the area, have a load of history, and were originally a maltings that supplied Simonds brewery. We’ve had well over 1000 signatures for our online petition (link from our website). How could a council locally list a landmark building and then recommend its demolition only a few months later?