Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-04-09 07:53:36 - Graham Ellis
It's all systems go on 48 Spa Road ... we'll be taking over "The Old Manor" on 31st May. Through the summer, we'll be thoroughly updating both inside and out, and we'll be opening in the Autumn as Well House Manor - a hotel specialising in accommodation for business visitors to Melksham.
Well House Manor is set on a three quarters of an acre site, just five minutes walk from the town centre. The closeness to the town, and yet the large space available, make it ideal for business men who will be driving down to Wiltshire, and want to stay in a town with good access to a choice of shops, pubs and restaurants.
The size of the site and location would also have made it ideal for housing development. I've been looking through some of the developer's plans that accompanied a planning application made a year or two back for over 20 dwelling units to be built. Fascinating; the application was never approved, and I can understand that it would have been rather out of place; we happened by a development that's underway by the same developer in Trowbridge yesterday and - well - I can understand why the neighbours felt that something this
would have been out of place in what is a quiet, ample-gardened leafy area of Melksham.
So how did the developers present their case? One of the big issues was access off the B road at the front into the site; at present, the entrance is "blind" and I know that when I visit there I come out with extreme caution. Even on foot, I walk out between the walls currently there on Friday and was nearly run over by a cyclist on the pavement. It turn out that the developers were planning to narrow the road so that they could get better visibility .. except that the plans described it as widening the pavements to make it safer for pedestrians. Isn't it interesting how the same change can be cast in two different lights!
((Footnote - we'll be neither widening the pavement nor narrowing the road, but we WILL be dropping the wall and increasing the visibility splay so that there will no longer be an issue; we're updating the access to an existing building and won't have any great change in traffic level, so that we're not going to over-engineer up to the level of entrance required for a cul-de-sac with 22 houses and a children's playground on it.))
