A second attempt to create flats in a former club building has been rejected by council officials. The bid by Mr E Berridge would have seen five flats set up in the upper floors of the former Lily’s Live Lounge venue in New Bond Street, in Leicester city centre.
A previous application for eight flats at the property was withdrawn by the applicant last year after planning officers at Leicester City Council raised concerns over living conditions for any future occupiers of the ground floor flats. The plan was then resubmitted with the new proposals suggesting the bottom floor of the property be kept in its current lawful use as a nightclub or function room.
However, this has prompted a new set of worries among the planning department. Future residents would be “unacceptably exposed” to noise under the current scheme, they said.
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While the ground floor is proposed to be used until 11pm, council noise officers said it has licensing permission to stay open much later, until 5am. They added a noise assessment submitted with the application “does not address noise associated with the ground floor use” which could include noise from “customers talking outside smoking, chatting, taxis coming and going”.
This “activity would occur […] right below the flats’ bedroom windows”. Planning officers ruling on the application agreed with their concerns, saying that, while conditions restricting hours of use “could potentially go some way to mitigating this”, they still consider the proposed 11pm finish to be “late”.
They also raised concerns over the living conditions offered by most of the flats. The top floor home would be mostly under low ceilings and, as such, residents would “suffer from extremely constrained and cramped living conditions”. There would also only be rooflights in this apartment, meaning there would be “no reasonable outlooks from any part of the lounge or bedrooms”.
Flats one and two would have had living room windows which would have been too close to neighbouring buildings. This would have left them with an “unacceptable lack of privacy” and a “less than ideal outlook”.
Officers concluded living conditions in the upper flat would be “extremely poor”, with that of flats one and two also considered “poor”. Additionally, the “future occupiers of the flats would be at unacceptable risk of noise pollution”, they said. Ultimately, they rejected the application.