Investment group launches appeal after Min development plans rejected
The Fragrance Group wants to turn Bath's old Royal Mineral Water Hospital into a hotel
An investment group based out of Singapore has lodged an appeal after its plans to turn a Bath hospital into a luxury hotel were refused.
The Fragrance Group bought the former Royal Mineral Water Hospital for £21.5 million pounds in 2018 and want to turn it into a 164-bed hotel.
Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) Councillors said the plans for the grade II listed building would overdevelop the site and make life in the neighbouring properties “almost untenable”.
The Fragrance Group though, says the councillors claims are not well founded and neighbours would not suffer significant harm.
Planning committee members also criticised the failure to boost biodiversity, but the developer says those arguments are baseless because the council's own ecologist did not object.
Its representatives said: “The appeal application was formulated over a two-year period in close consultation with the local planning authority, Historic England and other stakeholders.
“The principle of the proposed hotel use has been agreed as the optimum viable use by the principal parties.
“We can confirm that the appellant is committed to implement either appeal scheme, or the second application scheme that has been submitted in parallel with the planning appeal.”
They argue that it is "strongly in the public interest" that the vacant building is brought back into use.
“A prolonged period of vacancy will be damaging to the economy of Bath’s city centre in terms of loss of opportunity arising from site-specific economic activity, as well as the damaging effect of prolonged vacancy on business and investment confidence in Bath," they say.
BANES Council is yet to respond to the appeal or consider Fragrance Group’s revised application for a 160-bed hotel, which says it has taken a new design approach, reduced the scale and mass of the extension, addressed residential amenity issues and improved biodiversity.
The revised proposals have been met with more than 460 objections, more than double that for the previous scheme, although the influential Bath Preservation Trust is now in support.