Uproar over cafe owner's flats bid

Jane Wood, owner of the soon-to-open East Beach Caf, wants to build a block of 12 flats on the site of Riverside Autos, a crumbling Victorian brick-and-flint building with a link to a fascinating but long-forgotten episode in history.

But while Ms Wood's stunning seaside eaterie, created by international designer Thomas Heatherwick, has attracted widespread support in the town, the flats proposal faces opposition not only from River Road residents, but from Littlehampton Town Council, too, which voted on Monday night to lodge a strong objection.

Its planning committee agreed that the four-storey block would be out of keeping both with the appearance of River Road, and with other riverside properties along the Arun.

Arun District Council will have the final say over the plans, which propose retaining much of the flint-walled shell of the former warehouse, with the block of flats constructed on the inside and significantly taller than the existing roof.

Tougher controls on building in flood risk areas mean that the ground floor will be used for car parking, with the flats on the three floors above. Nine would be two-bedroom, and the other three one-bedroom.

The height of the new building is the main concern for residents of Pharos Quay, two blocks of flats on the opposite side of River Road.

Brian Bromfield, who lives there in a first-floot flat and is a director of the management company Pharos Quay Ltd, said: "At the moment, I can see over the roof of Riverside Autos to the west bank, and up the river, too, but that will be completely obscured if this goes ahead."

Another director, who asked not to be named, said the new block would be "ludicrously high".

A week ago, Ms Wood called her own public meeting at the Sea Scouts hut just across the footbridge at Rope Walk, to give people information about the scheme and answer their questions.

Yesterday (Wednesday) she told the Gazette that the block had to have three storeys of residential accommodation to pay for expensive repairs to the river wall and to preserve the flint walls.

She added: "This is high quality architecture, by an architect who was a finalist in the Grand Designs Awards last year for refurbishing an old building in an updated way, and who has won numerous national and international awards.

"This is not a listed building, and it would be infinitely cheaper to knock it down and start from scratch, but I care very much about the fabric of Littlehampton and I try to do things which I feel are an enhancement.

"I could put a couple of business units on there, or a distribution centre, because there is industrial use on the site at the moment, if I purely wanted to make money. But this is the last piece of history on the east bank of the river, and I want to preserve what I can of it."

* Part of that history concerns a Capt Thomas Isemonger, whose name is inscribed on a stone plaque on the building.

In 1844, he rescued a boatload of English people who had been captured by pirates off the Barbary Coast of Africa and who might otherwise had ended up in slavery, 37 years after the slave trade was abolished in Great Britain.