Developer accused of 'trying to put a quart into a pint pot'

CGI of new building which is in the centre of the picture

New plans have been submitted for the development of the Pissarro restaurant site in Chiswick.

Approval is being sought for the building of seven two bedroom flats and one three bedroom flat with eight parking spaces at the prime riverside location. The building will be three storeys high on the side closest to the river on the site which has been vacant since 2014.

The developer says the footprint of the new design is considerably smaller than the scheme which was refused permission last year. They are promising to echo the formal Georgian architecture found along the Thames with its clearly defined, formal frontages.

The application is being made on behalf of Corney Reach Way Ltd which is a company owned by Fruition Properties. They say that the new plans have taken into consideration the reasons an earlier proposal by Gort Investments was refused. Fruition acquired the property from Gort of £3.5mn after the previous owner's plan was turned down.

One opponent of the scheme said, "Local residents are tired of developers proposing plans that are blatantly impractical - this is a very small site, with no road frontage, access by a very narrow, angular unadopted road and no onstreet parking available on the private Estate. Whilst they have been messing about trying to put a quart into a pint pot some sort of cafe/bar/deli could have been installed."

A public exhibition was held this June after pre-application discussions had taken place with Hounslow Council. Approximately 130 people attended the public exhibition with 93 people returning a questionnaire/ feedback form at the public exhibition with some people completing and returning forms using the Freepost envelope provided. Over 70% of responses disagreed with the question on the form asking whether the new proposals were an improvement on the previous scheme. A larger proportion of the respondents still would like to see a restaurant or cafe at the site.

The application is currently marked as invalid on the Hounslow planning system but that is believed to be because of issues with some of the documentation submitted. We have asked Hounslow Council to confirm the reason but have yet to receive a response.

CGI of the rear of the building

The restaurant closed in 2013 and a previous application to redevelop the restaurant into residential units was turned down in 2014. The RNLI also lost the flat it rented on the premises, and there were a number of failed attempts to encourage restaurateurs to take on the site.

Current view of the site

Pissarro, which was named in honour of the 'Father of French Impressionism', Camille Pissarro (who painted many local scenes in the 1890s), opened in the late 1990s when it was owned by local investors. The restaurant had a chequered history, and at one stage suffered a serious fire. When it closed management said there was not enough business in that area to make it a commercially viable.

September 2, 2017