The Grass Verge Is Not The Answer !
The long running issues with parking at the Hamptons Mosque, continue to run. As the number of worshippers grows year on the year, the 98 onsite parking spaces are never going to cope with Friday prayers, let alone Ramadan traffic.
Parking provison based on sports and leisure use
Even for a sports and leisure centre, Hamptons is under provisioned. The original planning requirement for the building was based on one space per 22 square metres of gross floorspace (2,419 square metres in total), and required 110 car park spaces.
Ultimately due to design changes, this ended up at the 98 spaces the building has today, which was deemed “policy compliant” and “unlikely to result in increased street parking in the vicinity”. That last sentence has certainly come back to bite the Planning Officer, that wrote it.
The standard requirement for Places of Worship is one space per 10 square metres as defined by parking standards policy: This will therefore mean that for Hamptons to be used as a Place of Worship, a total of 242 parking spaces will be required, in order to be policy compliant – nearly two and half times larger than the existing car park area!
Using the grass verge
Over Ramadan, we’ve observed anything from 30-50 cars being parked on the grass verge, and grassed area in front of the tennis courts. This area has never been part of the approved parking provision for Hamptons
While CMS think this is a great idea, it has created a statutory noise nuisance affecting the residential properties, just over 3m away. This has been reported to our election motivated city councillors, and the Public Protection team. But it gets worse !
Sunday 16.04
Obstructing the highway
Not content with causing noise and disturbance, some worshippers decided they wouldn’t park on the grass verge, and thought obstructing the highway was a great idea. No chance of a 3.7m wide fire appliance getting to Pearl Square on Sunday night.
On Monday morning we contacted city councillors and the police to demand some action, and although Monday and Tuesday night was better managed by CMS, should we really have to fight to keep our access roads safe, and free from obstruction ?
Marshals were heard shouting “Always park this way, they are all watching and taking pictures”
Monday 17.04
Talk to the marshals and here’s what they say !
“It’s only another week”
“It’s only once a year”
“Yes, yes, we’ll tell them to park properly”
Do you get the impression, that they don’t really care what the neighbours think ?
We have passed on all the information and evidence about parking issues and the noise and disturbance to our dear friends at Planning Enforcement.