Noise, privacy and anti-social behaviour fears over resubmitted student flats plan in historic city building

Regent House in Leicester’s New Walk Conservation Area

The would-be neighbours of historic Leicester office buildings being eyed up for student accommodation have said they fear the impact it will have on their lives, views and tight-knit inner-city community. Developer Rumrat Ltd has resubmitted a bid to Leicester City Council to turn both the Grade II-listed Regent House and attached Waterloo House into flats and build a whole new block on the car park opposite.

The plan was originally submitted by Rumrat and subsequently refused by the city’s planning department last year. The developer has scaled down its proposal this time around in response to concerns the buildings would be overbearing in the context of the historic New Walk Conservation Area.

The new scheme would see 200 student bed spaces created across the Regent House and Waterloo House buildings, and the new block proposed for the car park, as opposed to the 268 proposed in the first iteration of the plan. The plan to add two storeys to Regent House has been reduced to one additional floor, and the original plan to add an extension to Waterloo House has been removed from the plan. The building on the car park over the road has been reduced from five storeys to three.

The proposed three-storey block of flats would sit in front of a row of terraces, known as the Southfields Cottages. The row of quaint houses, built in 1841 sits behind the car park, slightly lower than street level. Residents of the properties and those living in the connecting West Street told LeicestershireLive when the first application was submitted their view and daylight would be lost by a new block of flats.

Amanda Moffat, who owns one of those houses, has now told LeicestershireLive community concerns regarding the proposals remain despite the adjustments. She claimed the new plan “pretty much disregarded” the worries raised by neighbours first time around.

The key problem for the neighbours, she said, is the building planned for the car park because that will have the biggest impact on them. If it was just the building conversion, she personally would not object to it.

She said: “We’re devastated that we fought so hard to stop this last time and they’ve come back and they’ve not, I don’t feel really, taken on board the feedback. They say they have, they’ve gone down two levels, but it’s still huge and imposing.

“Our row [of houses] is quite considerably lower than street level anyway. So for them to then build up right in front of that row would obliterate a considerable amount of light coming into our living areas, particularly our downstairs.”

She also raised worries about the impact such a huge number of students moving into the street would have on the community. “It tips the balance away from people who care about the area,” she added.

“No offence to students but they don’t [care as much], it’s a transient population. It becomes an undesirable place to live because of that. If you walk around some of the areas which is purely student accommodation, the amount of litter from takeaway… It just becomes so excessive that people don’t actually want to live there. We would just lose the community feel that we have.”

When she heard about the resubmission, she said she had a sense of “here we go again”. She said: “Is it a kind of wearing down tactic [on the part of the developer]? I did feel like we did everything we possibly could the first time around.

“It was a sort of a feeling of ‘oh God, here we go again’ [when I heard]. What else can we do to make our point? But I guess we’ve just got to do everything again because it still applies. All of the objections still apply. Just because they’ve reduced the size slightly, it doesn’t change anything.”

The community also has concerns that adding another building to the street is only going to exacerbated the problems with flooding that already exist. Ms Moffat said the area was hit hard by the flooding earlier this year.

She said: “I remember applying for a new drain for out the front of our properties because they do tend to flood. The amount of water that has filled our cellar…We have a pump in that cellar now… So, we asked about the council, if we could have a drain away into the main drain to try and help alleviate that problem.

“We were told the sewage and water system was over overloaded anyway. So how they can increase that by how many bedrooms there are going to be and how many ensuites and toilets? I don’t know how they can make that work without serious improvement of the sewerage and water system.”

Parking is also a problem in the area, she added. Neighbours disagree with assertions by the applicant that the car park proposed to be built on is underused. Ms Moffat said she sees it full on a daily basis. She added it is already “incredibly hard to find somewhere to park” for residents and the additional people living in the area could make that worse, though she accepted not all students would have cars.

There are worries locally as well over the impact this development would have on the heritage of the area. Ms Moffat said: “For them to whack up a great big modern looking student accommodation and trying to say it would enhance the conservation area… It would block the view of the fielding Johnson Hospital, which is grade two listed.

“Anybody coming up Regent Road or Tigers Way, they would not be able to see it until they were more or less at the traffic lights. So you can’t then appreciate that building. For the people on West Street again, it would obliterate their views.”

LeicestershireLive has approached the applicant via their planning agent but has not yet received a response. Residents can comment on the proposal on the Leicester City Council website until Tuesday, March 12.