A new nursery is set to be built on Newcastle’s Great Park estate.
Newcastle City Council’s planning committee granted approval last week for a two-storey day nursery to open at a vacant plot in the Great Park’s town centre.
Kid ‘n’ Play, which operates nurseries in Heaton and Gosforth, are planning to open a new site that will have capacity for 120 children aged from three months to five years old.
Councillors were told at a meeting last Friday that the site in Maynard Street had originally been earmarked as office accommodation under the original plans for the Great Park’s development, but that had failed to materialise.
A lack of amenities within the new-build suburb has long been a source of frustration for its residents, who waited more than a decade for the estate’s first supermarket before Morrisons finally opened in 2023.
While the Great Park does already have another nursery, Kids 1st in Roseden Way, Friday’s planning committee meeting heard that the town centre development would help provide further facilities for residents and boost footfall on the high street.
Liberal Democrat councillor Henry Gallagher joked that “the children it was intended for are probably now the parents whose children will be using it”.
It is expected that 29 staff will be employed at the business.
A planning officer’s report stated: “The proposed development has a contemporary design to reflect the surrounding character of this part of Great Park. The potential impacts upon amenity and highway safety have been assessed and found to comply with all relevant planning policies.
“The development would utilise the existing car park to the rear of the site and includes a footpath link to be formed to ensure connectivity to the wider District Centre. Off-site landscape enhancement planting has been secured, along with its long-term maintenance, to ensure the development would provide an overall biodiversity net gain to the area.
“Taking all these points together, it can be concluded that the development would represent a sustainable form of development through: being fully inclusive; well- connected and accessible by sustainable modes of transport; being well designed, and enhance the character and natural environment of this part of Great Park.”
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
