Garden Centre

Whitehall is an extremely popular and successful garden centre near the historic and attractive National Trust village of Lacock. It has successfully grown on an ad hoc basis since 1968 and remains in the ownership of the Self family.

Existing garden centre

There had been a number of previous planning permissions to extend the centre over the previous decade but the family felt a more comprehensive redevelopment and re-ordering of the site was required. RCC were approached to provide planning consultancy services to take this proposal through the pre-application, community involvement and formal planning submission processes.

It was a very interesting but extremely challenging process to bring together a wide variety of specialist consultants to address the detailed issues raised by the planning proposal. RCC co-ordinated the whole process and we had to undertake careful negotiations with the planning officers. The result was a recommendation of approval from the officers.

Due to the size and nature of the proposal however, the application needed to be presented to the Strategic Planning Committee with councillors on that committee making the final decision. RCC attended and spoke to the committee promoting the proposal where, after a lengthy debate, councillors agreed to approve the planning application, much to the delight of our clients.