Business will create 40 new jobs in Gloucester
It used to be an airfield and home to factories making iconic aircraft, but a bustling business park in Brockworth is about to welcome the latest addition - an investment creating 40 jobs for Gloucest
It might be called Gloucester Business Park, but the Brockworth site is actually on Tewkesbury Borough Council’s patch - and the council’s just approved the latest investment for a major business.
Borough planners have backed the proposals for a new supermarket on a northern plot of the business park, which was once an airfield and site of a factory making iconic aircraft such as the Hawker Hurricane, Gloster Gladiator, and the Gloster Javelin.
The scheme, by the British arm of the German discount supermarket Lidl, includes a 1,975 sqm store and will have 118 car parking spaces including 12 parent and child spaces and seven accessible parking bays along with six electric vehicle bays and cycle parking.
The new store is expected to create up to 40 new jobs and the proposed opening hours would be from 7am to 10pm Monday to Saturday and from 10am to 4pm on Sundays.
Rosie Meehan, regional head of property for Lidl Great Britain, called on Tewkesbury Borough Council’s planning committee to approve the scheme.
“Despite previous permissions and extensive marketing over 30 years for employment uses and while all surrounding employment land has been developed and successfully let, this site has never come forward for development,” she said.
Meehan also said the land’s constrained nature had limited its viability.
“The proposal before you represents a sustainable and productive alternative use,” she said.
Councillor Mary Jordan (I, Churchdown St John’s) asked if biodiversity improvements associated with the development could be provided locally.
Officers said they could be elsewhere and there was a suggestion some of the improvements might be in Malvern, but there would be a formal process related to this.
Councillor Matt Dimond-Brown (G, Tewkesbury South) said parish councils in Brockworth and Hucclecote asked for genuine improvements in bus provision serving the site.
“This application talks about an upgraded shelter and real time information,” he said.
“That’s about furniture not service. What is the current bus service to this particular site and what improvements could be made?”
Officers said the bus services are “interesting in this area” because Gloucester Business Park is currently unadopted but there are regular services running through the site.
“The nearest of which is just north of the Lidl site on the approach to Tesco, there’s a bus shelter there ” a highways officer told the meeting.