An Exeter City Council decision to approve plans for an 813-bed student and “co-living” complex in Heavitree Road is to increase the number of beds in purpose-built temporary accommodation to nearly 3,250 in Newtown and more than 16,000 across the whole city.
The plans for 399 student and 414 “co-living” bedspaces in seven blocks up to six storeys tall on the site of the former police station and magistrates court were submitted in May, following the eventual rejection of previous, similar proposals for the site which were first put forward in July 2020.
The approval decision, taken at last week’s council planning committee meeting, partly relied on the council’s untested claim that it can count student accommodation in its housing delivery figures against government-set targets.
It has not been able to do so since it unsuccessfully challenged a planning inspector’s decision to grant consent at appeal for 120 dwellings in Pinhoe in the High Court in 2015, but changed its position in May without providing any evidence to support its new claim.
The Heavitree Road decision follows council approval of a 108-bed student block in Longbrook Street in September despite falling university student numbers and significant higher education sector challenges which are putting prospective Exeter student accommodation demand in doubt.
Illustrative view of Heavitree Road “co-living” blocks. Image: Exeter City Council.
Newtown already has 1,676 purpose-built student beds in seven developments in College Road, Heavitree Road, Lower Albert Street, Cheeke Street and Western Way as well as 133 temporary beds in The Gorge, which is the only “co-living” block that has so far been built in Exeter.
According to its operators the block, which is immediately adjacent to the Heavitree Road development site, is still only four-fifths occupied despite opening more than two years ago.
Proposals to replace Clarendon House with a 297-bed student accommodation complex have been submitted to the council for approval, and an application for another 180-bed student block in Summerland Street, to replace the Unit 1 nightclub, is expected soon.
Together with a 145-bed “co-living” block in Summerland Street that was approved in January last year but has yet to be built, the additional 813 beds in Heavitree Road brings the purpose-built temporary accommodation tally pipeline to 3,244 beds in Newtown alone.
Illustrative view of Heavitree Road student accommodation blocks. Image: Exeter City Council.
When the Heavitree Road developers submitted their plans for the site in May, they said that the new scheme “directly addresses and resolves key concerns” which had been raised in response to the previous plans for site redevelopment, which the council refused in February 2023.
The previous scheme, for 955 rooms in two blocks up to seven storeys tall, had been enthusiastically recommended by council development director Ian Collinson but was described by planning committee members as “a blot on the landscape” and “hideous”.
It underwent eight design iterations, four rounds of public consultation and was considered at no fewer than six planning committee meetings before it was eventually rejected by councillors.
A planning inspector then upheld the committee’s decision at appeal twelve months later, saying that the proposed buildings would appear as “vastly larger than any other nearby building”.
Illustrative view of Heavitree Road blocks above Higher Summerlands. Image: Exeter City Council.
The architect responsible for the new scheme, Brown & Company, said that the plans put forward in May would reduce the “overall height, footprint and mass of the development” compared with the rejected scheme.
It also said that the six-storey student block on the northern side of the development site would be “appropriately scaled for the area” and “no taller that [sic] the neighbouring Gorge property”.
The Gorge is five storeys tall and overlooks two-storey residential houses in Sandford Walk and flats in three-storey blocks in St Matthew’s Close.
It added that the four-storey and five-storey “co-living” blocks on the western side of the development site had been reduced in scale in response to the two-storey residential houses in immediately-adjacent Higher Summerlands.
Subsequent revisions to the now-approved scheme reduced one of the buildings alongside The Gorge to five storeys but kept the other at six, and retained both the five-storey blocks alongside St Matthew’s Close and the four-storey and five-storey blocks alongside Higher Summerlands.
Higher Summerlands residential housing beside development site boundary.
A total of 79 trees are to be felled and removed from the site.
Keith Lewis of Exeter Civic Society, speaking at last week’s planning committee meeting, said the blocks alongside Higher Summerlands would “dwarf” residents’ homes and impose “fundamental changes to their lives and neighbourhood”.
He also pointed out that the Heavitree Road scheme fails to meet the standards set out in existing local plan policy, adopted by the council in 2010, which says that a “minimum back to back distance of 22 metres is required between habitable room windows” to maintain privacy so that residents are “comfortable in their dwellings without being overlooked or hemmed in”.
The distances between houses in Higher Summerlands and three of the “co-living” blocks that will overlook them are below this threshold, with one block only fourteen metres away.
Keith Lewis said that Higher Summerlands residents would have “28 people or more potentially looking into their homes”, and asked the committee: “Would you be happy to have 28 homes overlooking your bedroom?”
Pinhoe councillor Duncan Wood responded that he was “a little bit disappointed” that “somehow we’ve ended up not achieving the 22 metres privacy guideline”.
He added: “That’s a little bit embarrassing, but we are where we are”.
