Contentious Boat Store Approved Despite Parish Council Resistance

A contentious bid to build a wooden boat store on a picturesque Isle of Wight seafront has been approved, despite resistance from a local parish council.

County Hall has waved through Timothy Lyle’s planning application for a four metre by eight metre unit at The Esplanade in Seaview, in the face of objections from Nettlestone and Seaview Parish Council (NSPC) and members of the public.

Mr Lyle said the building will ‘improve the look and feel of the site which currently has an underwhelming and unkempt feel to it and is much in need of improvement’, in a letter to planners earlier this year.

It said:

“I am proposing a simple wooden garage unit (which is a little higher than a normal garage to allow for the storage of boats upright and to provide a small mezzanine sail storage area) similar to those boathouses placed on this site by my mother in the past but have since rotted away.

“All surveyed trees are to be retained within the scheme and there is no clearance required for this proposal.”

Referring to an ecological statement submitted for a neighbouring unit, he said the application site offers ‘little ecological integrity’.

Opposing application 25/00112/FUL, NSPC cited a ‘destruction of green space’ and the ‘overdevelopment of an area’ next to woodland.

The council’s decision report said:

“The proposed building would be sited in a row of other relatively small buildings, which have a mix of designs but are all beach huts or boat stores and are appropriate to the seafront location.

“The development has been sited to take account of the woodland to the rear and the east, and the site itself, which is an area of gravel, has little in the way of ecological value.”

Seven conditions were attached to the consent for reasons of legal and planning policy compliance, environmental and local amenity protection and preventing the storage unit being used for ‘overnight accommodation’.