A developer has submitted plans to build 566 student rooms behind an old manor house in Brighton in four blocks – one of them 15 storeys high.
The £150 million scheme at Moulsecoomb Place involves knocking down existing 1990s student blocks which have room for 163 people at Brighton University.
The developer, Cathedral (Moulsecoomb) Advisory LLP, also plans to build an extension linking the grade II listed manor house and tithe barn.
Cathedral said that the grounds of the five-acre site would become a public park, towards the top end of Lewes Road.
The four proposed student housing blocks would range from 4 to 15 storeys high, the company said, with plans that include a student gym and wellbeing studio.
Cathedral also pledged to keep the Moulsecoomb Social Club and said that as well as a community space, the scheme would include a pub, restaurant, events space and 10 guest bedrooms.
Parts of the flint walls would be demolished and a ground source heat pump would be installed, according to the planning application submitted to Brighton and Hove City Council.
Cathedral chief executive Richard Upton said: “After two years of careful design and consultation, I would like to thank the community groups, ward councillors and hundreds of people who participated in our consultations and meetings.
“Feedback from local businesses, community groups and residents was crucial to help us establish what would work on this complex site which has been underused for many years.
“We have heard a lot of local support for our proposals which will open up the listed gardens and buildings for everyone to enjoy.”
Cathedral said that the student blocks would be managed 24 hours a day, with dedicated community space at ground-floor level, accessed from Queensdown School Road.
The company said: “Brighton has a shortfall of over 4,000 student bedrooms which is taking too many affordable homes away from families.
“These proposals will go some way to addressing that shortfall, putting student bedrooms in the heart of a university campus rather than taking land in residential and commercial areas. In turn this will lead to a release of affordable family homes in the city.”
The developer also intends to manage the “pub hub club” itself and said that the scheme would generate long-term work as well as more than 60 constructions jobs during the building and restoration phase.
Cathedral said: “Additional employment and training opportunities will include security, janitorial and housekeeping roles within the student accommodation.”
Mr Upton added: “We intend to deliver an exceptional, sustainable, lively and more accessible place which brings great benefit to the local community of Moulsecoomb and the wider city.”
To see the plans and comment on them, go to the planning portal on the council’s website and search for BH2022/03892.
Typical developer comment that HMOs are taking affordable homes away from families, a proposition for which there has never been any evidence whatsoever. Down our street, which is not at all upmarket, the current going rate for an ‘affordable’ home which has been turned into an HMO is close on half a million, which, I suggest, is hardly affordable for an average family.
May one ask why the council panders to all these applications for hundreds of – usually very ugly – student homes (they’re not homes at all, since the students move on after a while) and does nothing to encourage starter homes for proper local residents.
If there is a shortage of 4,000 student ‘homes’, then I suggest that someone tackles the universities, which are admitting more students than they are able to accommodate. That is nothing against the students themselves, but this studentification has to stop somewhere and sometime – like now. If the unis don’t have the accommodation on yap already, then the answer is to curtail intake, not to be complicit in building yet more very ugly tower blocks.
Spot on.
Not sure your position makes any sense. Building student housing privately on land that is already student housing is a no brainer. The issue of starter homes for local residents is a different issue. How would the council ‘encourage’ the building of more starter homes?
Student homes aren’t homes? What a bizarre thing to say. Students spend at least three years on a degree.
Three years isn’t long enough to be considered living there? Strange opinion.
And many of them change abodes during the course. I have three HMOs opposite me and one next door and they have rarely contained the same occupants for more than a year or so.
Benjamin
Students have accommodation, usually just a room with shared utilities, therefore not a ‘home’ as such. You obviously don’t know the difference, very sad and worrying.
Absolute idiocy. The Unis are obliged to take a given number and have no choice but to try and maximise intake to ensure they can actually survive. You forget this is actually a business and provides a huge number of jobs for the city. Prices found for HMO rooms do not include gas/electric/data etc. Dedicated student accommodation does and also moves the student congregation away from residential areas. The single biggest moan from Brighton residents is whole areas have effectively become student “ghetto’s” and that brings with it its own issues. Providing accommodation close to, or on the site of the uni’s is by far the most sensible idea. Contracts for mnost of th developments are 52week so ARE “homes” and some that are vacated during summertime are let to foreign students and for conference use, thereby bringing even more money into the city.You really do need to get your head out of the sand and actually realise the benefits that this type of solution brings to the rest of the city and perhaps understand what would happen should people like you contribute to the decline of the universities in the city with your narrow minded bile – use em or lose em – lets see howe the city does without the thousands of jobs…….
Tony Ward
What a load of old rubbish you spout.
In a report submitted via a Freedom of information request the following information was revealed.
Elite universities are offering to pay students up to £2,000 each to take a gap year after accepting more applicants than there are places available.
Russell Group universities have offered students big sums of money, preferential treatment towards ‘first-choice’ accommodation and help with paying the costs, and even paid work experience, in return for delaying their studies by a year.
In another report
Up in the North West, the University of Manchester offered £1,000 to 190 management course applicants to delay studies by one year
Now that students can apply to up to five universities at once, admissions departments have been making more offers than they can accept.
This has led to universities such as Nottingham, Exeter, and Manchester offering lucrative sums to put off applicants for a year.
F.O.I confirms that Nottingham offered 260 medical course applicants £2,000 to defer their studies for a year, while 59 graduate entry nursing applicants were offered £1,000 each.
Therefore your opening statement is nothing more than made up and this report actually confirms that there are TOO MANY students.
If or not rented property includes heating/gas/electric is irrelevant.
Glad you agree that student “ghetto’s” brings with it its own issues.
Yes 100% agree providing accommodation close to, or on the site of the uni’s is by far the most sensible idea.
Sorry I don’t agree contracts for most of the developments are 52week ARE “homes”. They are shared accommodation or single rooms and as you rightly say some are vacated during summertime and let to foreign students.
As for the revenue generated, agree, but on the whole the landlords and Uni’s benefit from these and contribute nothing towards council taxes for the services provided.
The Uni’s have the equivalent of around 2,500 staff, a number that has not increased much over the last ten years or so despite the huge increase in Student numbers in the same period.
There’s plenty of evidence that suggests a huge increase in student accommodation yet little return of family homes.
Just take a step back for a moment and think, how much has been lost in council taxes by homes taken over by students. I can state 17 houses in one road alone have been converted from family homes, a huge amount of CT lost to the City. How much revenue has been lost across the city?
If the trend continues, how long before every house in this City is designated for students and who is going to pay for all the services if nothing is being paid in.
Talk about decline of the Uni’s, utter B/S, have you seen the decline of the whole city ?
This is more greed, pure and simple. Fresh from their back slapping over the Preston Barracks development, sights are now set on making more profits by slamming down a load more tower blocks that serve only the business model of the university and line the pockets of the developers. Despite the well used platitudes about improving the area for the community – they are all nonsense. It’s already an accessible green space so don’t present that as a benefit of the development. And why is the consultation launched the day before Xmas Eve? Almost like they are trying to ensure the fewest number of people see it. These scheme always try and make such a tiny window for objections.
Re the consultation, they did exactly the same thing with the Brighton Gasworks consultation last year. Put up the hundreds of pages of documentation on the council website just before Christmas and gave a very short deadline. Much of the stuff was incomprehensible to the average person. However, key pieces of information were missing and statutory consultees raised multiple questions and objections, so a year went by and, suddenly, just before Christmas again, they slapped in a revised application. i’m not sure whether this is to do with the council itself or whether developers time it deliberately. Whichever (or both), it’s wholly unreasonable to expect residents to wade through all this stuff in a very short timeframe with two Bank Holiday periods intervening. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s wholly unreasonable to expect the average resident to go through it at all in detail, since such material is complied by experts in particular fields and the general public is not qualified to analyse it fully (and nor are councillors in general, so they rely to a large extent on officer reports). This might not matter if someone wants to build an extension, which we’re all capable of understanding, but it matters a great deal with a large development like this one.
The private purpose built rooms are £235pw upwards. The last £118 ones on the Sussex Uni
campus are getting knocked down if they haven’t been already. The students objected and
last Spring briefly occupied their social club. They pointed out that less privileged students without
parental support can’t afford to live on campus.
£235 pw upwards? I had no idea. Well, that’s a slam dunk and unanswerable argument to the ‘freeing up HMOs’ rubbish – I just looked on a website for the price of rooms in HMOs and they were around the £120/130 or so mark (some even cheaper). If this were me, now (and I never had parents who could have afforded to put me through uni, so I did a degree later fairly locally as a part-time mature student – evenings mostly) there is no way on earth that someone from my background could afford a purpose-built bedroom, or whatever it is, away from home plus having the student loan millstone round my neck for years. Really, all this started up in earnest all over the country when every establishment of higher learning decided to become a university, often by amalgamating bits and pieces of other educational establishments, just as Brighton Uni did.
You don’t need parents to afford university. I can attest to that personally. I did it twice. You could still go now if you wanted to. It’s also interesting to note that someone who has never been can hold such strong opinions without a basis.
Read it properly. I did the degree (with hons) on a part-time basis.
Benjamin
Correct. You just need to take money from the government under a loan scheme that is unlikely ever to be repaid.
It’s for students so the council will back it
The hypocritical Greens know, only to well, that they will get the student vote. So, building yet more student accommodation, not affordable housing, is what they aim for. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with any improvement in the area.
The council tax paying residents of the Lewes Road area are becoming increasingly aware that there is nothing we can do about the mass studentification of most of Brighton north east of the level for the reasons shown above by my fellow commentators.
Something else that also concerns me is the fact that these mass developments do not seem to include any medical facilities for the huge numbers of students dwelling in them. As there is already a crisis in providing sufficient access to dental and medical cover in the area for those of us live here permanently this will surely only exacerbate the problem.
Also as the council constantly claims to have no money whatsoever to provide even basic services (except cycle hangers) I am at a loss to understand how Brighton council can approve further developments that consume council tax paid for services but pay nothing back in.
A law should be passed, that students are only allowed to vote in the area they were brought up. Or preferably not at all, until they get some real life experience knocked into them.
Second that. Or, the law could be that you can only vote where you live (temporarily in the case of most students) if you are registered for council tax, which they’re not. Still, if they’re all concentrated in a particular small area, then the Greens may get in there, but not elsewhere.
What a dystopian comment. You’re clearly stereotyping the one kind of student you know at the expense of all others.
You’re also insinuating that because someone moved to an area for study, this is somehow different to someone moving to an area for work or other reasons.
Your logic does not hold up, I’m afraid.
You misunderstand what the word ‘dystopian’ means. It entails suffering and fearful feelings, which is hardly the case here. Also, if someone moves to an area for work or other reasons then they are likely to pay, or at least be registered for, council tax, none of which applies to students.
Benjamin
Clearly you fail to understand the difference between those that come here to work and those who come to study.
Those who come here to work, will have to pay council tax, students don’t.
Those that come here to work will have to pay full prices on bus travel if they choose that mode of transport. Students enjoy massive discounts on the buses and many outlets give discounts as well.
The poor hard done by students. You really need to think about your comment, not understanding the difference between study and work is really a worry.
Thank you very much, Helen. Benjamin has clearly mislaid the plot here, which I have attempted to explain in recent responses.
As you say, coming here for work is not the same thing as coming here to study – and people who move here (other than students) for work or other reasons do have to pay council tax – or at least they are registered as liable, none of which applies to students.