1,500-home neighbourhood proposed for Wrexham

Housebuilder Redrow Homes has lodged outline proposals for a new neighbourhood providing more than 1,500 new homes on the edge of Wrexham’s city centre. 

Earmarked for a 73-hectare site at Lower Berse Farm, the scheme also involves a local centre and a 420-place primary school. 

An illustrative masterplan indicates that the project would deliver 1,520 properties, a mix of one to four-bedroom homes with 15 per cent affordable housing. The local centre could provide shops, a community hall, a children’s nursery, and a pub. The centre will involve the conversion of the listed buildings at Lower Berse Farm. Around 23 hectares of the site would be public open space. 

The site is allocated for housing in Wrexham County Borough Council’s draft replacement local development plan (LDP). However, this replacement LDP has had a tortuous gestation. Back in 2012, the council went back to the drawing board after ditching an earlier version because of unresolved housing issues. 

The latest iteration was originally submitted for examination by the then-Planning Inspectorate in 2018. There were hearings in 2019, major changes to the plan and further examination in 2020 and 2022. There were wrangles over sites for new housing and for Travellers, as well as a dispute about population figures and forecasts. 

The final report on the draft replacement development plan was presented to the council earlier this year. The inspectors said that the final version of the blueprint was “sound”, however, councillors have twice voted against approving the LDP. 

A group of developers, including Redrow, are mounting a legal challenge against the city council’s failure to approve the replacement LDP.  

28 September 2023 
Roger Milne, The Planner 

Our planning news is published in association with The Planner, the official magazine of the Royal Town Planning Institute.