Mary Arches Redevelopment: Our Latest Response – Update and ECC Planning Committee Outcome

Ahead of the ECC Planning Committee deciding on the redevelopment of the Mary Arches car parks our Society handed in a further written response to the latest set of documents provided by the developer and the officer's report. We do not think that the report dealt adequately with identified harm. Co-living does not meet local housing needs and in our view therefore cannot be used as an argument to outweigh the identified harms. We find the room-kitchen ratio problematic. We don't think the provision for re-purposing the buildings in case Co-living would not work is substantial enough. Staffing the building is much less than with other Co-living consents. And we obviously are not happy with reading nothing about any North Street Improvements, despite our initiative which we made public to ECC in October 2025. The committee meeting will be on Monday, 19 January, starting 17:30, Rennes Room, Civic Centre and we expect to speak in the role of Opposer.

We say, the officer’s recommendation effectively normalises harm: because the existing car park is considered poor, the report’s assessment accepts a replacement that causes ‘harm’, and places this harm without any further explanation ‘at the upper end of less than substantial’ (16.17), even acknowledging that this is ‘a missed opportunity to repair the harm caused by post war development’ (16.3). If this logic is established by planning officers, future new schemes will result in further erosion of heritage significance on the basis that the area is already degraded, creating a cycle of cumulative decline. Such a cumulative degradation is directly contrary to the NPPF requirement to enhance or better reveal significance, not to entrench decline.

In the report’s conclusion ‘the benefits in terms of provision of residential development to meet demonstrated housing need’ are considered to ‘outweigh the heritage harm and all other harms’. However, Co‑living fails to address Exeter’s demonstrated housing need. The city’s housing register shows that around 2,000–2,200 single‑person households are waiting for genuinely affordable, self‑contained one‑bed homes, making single adults the largest group on the register. Census 2021 data reinforce this structural need: in Exeter, over 55’s account for more than half of all single‑person households, while those under 35 make up only around 13%. The Knight Frank document is an investment assessment for developers not a demand assessment for housing and cannot be afforded weight in the determination of housing need. Further, the Mary Arches location is exceptionally suitable for the over 55 cohort due to its close proximity to vital social, transport and retail opportunities. But this cohort would not have adequate income to live in this development, and we find it is wholly unsuitable for this age group to live in bed-sit accommodation. Therefore this Co‑living development does nothing to meet the needs of these older single households.

For our full response see the sidebar entry.

 

Update

Gert Vonhoff spoke for our Society at ECC’s Planning Committee on 19 Jan 2026 in the Opposer role. His focus was on:

  • ‘Identified harm’, stating that the new building would mark a missed opportunity to reinstate historic street patterns;
  • ‘Meeting local housing need’, making the point that yet another co-living development further would fail to address Exeter’s  demonstrated need for 1, 2, and 3 bedroom places, and that the new building is not laid out for the over 55s need;
  • ‘North Street improvement’, expressing our disappointment that our Society’s North Street Vision has not been ignored by the officer’s report;
  • Reminding ECC that as owner of the site they have responsibility to get this  right.
Cllr Mitchell asked the developer about our objection to yet more co-living development and they said it would be their risk and they ‘believed’ (this word they used 3 times) in their market analysis, without providing any more details.  Over time it became clear that our first argument about the harm had had some effect. More and more speakers congregated around a term the Urban Design and Landscape Officer had used, when speaking about a sub-optimal design. Even the Chair and the Director of Space could not hold the tide against this. And so the result was a deferral of the application on the basis of scale and massing and the design of  street facing aspects. Some wanted to frame this only on Block B, but a minority saw this for both blocks and as the motion was set in the wider sense this was voted on:  8 were in favour of deferral, 2 against it. There is some expectation that the developer will come back with better plans and Exeter gets what the members of the Committee judged as potential to improve on the 75% they saw the project already achieved.