The Meadows Community Centre stands on the land between Arbury Road, St Catharine’s Road and St Alban’s Road. It is operated by Cambridge City Council, although the building is within South Cambridgeshire’s border. It’s a well-equipped and popular community centre with a large hall, a number of function rooms, a recreation ground, a café etc. I’m sure many of you will have attended events there.
There is a proposal to replace it with a new Community Hub, keeping about the same size and mix of community space but incorporating approximately 100 new City Council rented flats. This will be achieved by building two 5-storey residential blocks over the new community hub, and a further four 2-5 storey blocks on the land currently occupied by the existing community centre.
The existing centre will continue to operate until new hub is built. It will then be demolished, and flats constructed in its place. It is proposed to also redevelop of the nearby Buchan Street site, replacing its Neighbourhood Centre with dwellings, so that the community facilities are concentrated at Meadows.
Steve and Martin attended a briefing about the scheme last week, and we felt the plans were generally well thought out with the potential to provide much-needed affordable housing while maintaining and enhancing the community facilities. We asked for a number of clarifications, mainly around impact on traffic, car & cycle parking and electric vehicle charging facilities.
There is a community consultation under way, ending on 25th March. It’s a good opportunity to have a say about the proposal before it reaches the formal planning stage, when there will be a statutory planning consultation.
You can download a draft site plan and the consultation leaflet here:
https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/consultations/meadows-centre-and-buchan-street-consultation
There will also be two drop-in sessions featuring exhibition boards:
Meadows Community Centre, Wednesday 13th March from 3pm to 9 pm
Buchan Street Neighbourhood Centre, Thursday 14th March from 12pm to 2pm
We would be interested to hear any comments you may have regarding the scheme. To re-iterate, this is a Cambridge City Council development, not South Cambs, but nevertheless we felt it of interest to people in the ward.
hiopcouncillors 
One interesting difference here is that since it is a City Council development, it will be to the standards laid down in it’s Local Plan – and so all of the properties will be accessible and adaptable (what used to be “lifetime homes”) and some will additionally be wheelchair friendly.
Since it’s in Impington, the Parish Council planning committee will be commenting on it – so would also be interested in any views that you may have.
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[…] wrote in March about the proposal to redevelop the Meadows Centre to build a significant number of (City) council dwellings and replace the community centre. The […]
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