Huge plans for popular gig venue Victoria Warehouse have been approved

Huge plans for the site of the popular gig venue Victoria Warehouse have been approved – including a new top floor terrace and a running track on the roof.

The plans centre around building a new seven storey car park, making changes to the existing gig venue warehouse and reconfiguring the existing hotel on site, of which only 40 rooms are currently in use.

The Victoria Warehouse site on Wharf Road in Stretford, Trafford is made up of three early 20th century warehouses with a detached, six-storey building that is currently home to a hotel at the east of the site.

The first two levels of the western warehouse form the well-known music and exhibition space.

The site’s owners asked Trafford council for permission to reconfigure the buildings on site to provide 200 ‘high quality’ rooms in the hotel, build a seven storey car park with 183 spaces and build a roof extension on top of the hotel for a roof terrace and function room there.

They also wanted to put a new roof on the western warehouse as well as convert the second and third floors of the building, above the O2 Victoria Warehouse, into office space and install two new lifts and a staircase in the building.

There’s also set to be a new running track and clubhouse on the roof of the building next to the events centre.

Council officers had recommended that councillors on the committee approve the application and the committee supported that recommendation and approved the application unanimously.

At the same meeting, plans to demolish an old hotel in Stretford and replace it with apartments, right next to three Grade II listed heritage sites, was refused.

Councillors debated the designs for the Greatstone Hotel on Chester Road – the council had received a number of letters from nearby residents in support of the application due to its provision of ‘much needed’ new housing for the community.

But local Gorse Hill ward councillor Coun Mike Cordingley was not of the same opinion – along with the rest of the planning committee.

While councillors praised the fact that the plans made use of a brownfield site and were set to provide the required number of affordable homes, members were very concerned about the small size of the 56 flats planned for the site.

Coun Aidan Williams, chairing the meeting, raised his concerns that the flats fell ‘significantly below’ nationally required minimum space requirements and that a number of the balconies for some flats were so small that they would be unusable.

The plans were rejected unanimously by Trafford council’s planning committee due to the layout, scale, massing and ‘poor design’ of the plans.

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