Full planning permission has been granted for a new, purpose-built 80-bed care home in a central part of Peterborough.
The development will help address the identified shortfall in specialist care accommodation across the city, offering high-quality facilities and a modern environment designed specifically for the needs of older residents.
The brownfield site, which is approximately 1.0 acre (0.40 hectares), is located on Oundle Road near the city centre, and contains the now disused Cherry Tree pub and outbuildings, along with an existing car park. The site benefits from excellent roadside frontage and access to local amenities, along with public transport links in close proximity. Peterborough Cathedral and River Nene Embankment Park are less than a mile from the site, with the city’s green spaces also in close proximity.
The three-storey care home will include access to secure, landscaped gardens designed to promote active lifestyles, relaxation and wellbeing. A wide range of high-quality facilities designed to enhance residents’ comfort, wellbeing, and daily experience include a variety of day spaces such as a cinema and library, a hair and nail salon, external terraces on all levels, an activity room, café, and spacious wetroom en-suite bedrooms. Ancillary areas such as staff facilities, offices, centrally located nurse stations, and treatment rooms will support efficient, high-quality care. Residents, staff and visitors parking has been configured directly off the main site access, with 28 on site car parking spaces, including 2 disabled spaces.
The Cherry Tree Pub building is locally listed and is to be retained and reinstated as a café/bistro for residents. This will retain the strong street frontage and largely mask the new care home building behind it.
Peterborough has a growing elderly population. The local demographic trends reflect a large elderly population, comprising circa 26,000 people.
With many of the city’s care homes in older, repurposed buildings—often small in scale—there is an urgent need for modern facilities that can provide high-quality care at the scale needed. This project is a key step in meeting both local and national objectives for elderly care, and it underscores the value of strategic, sustainable development in areas of acute need.
The Peterborough care home development will deliver the following benefits following the granting of planning permission:
- Ensure the long-term protection of the Cherry Tree public house, a non-designated heritage asset, and the positive contribution that it makes to the Oundle Road street scene.
- Create a distinct sense of place achieved through a detailed analysis of the site context and a high-quality design and layout informed by that context.
- Cause no harm to the amenity of neighbours and create a good standard of amenity for future residents.
- Contribute towards meeting the accommodation needs of older persons on a derelict brownfield site.
- Have no adverse highway or flood risk impacts.
- Achieve landscaping and biodiversity enhancements.
The development will be constructed by Wynbrook in partnership with Synergy Care Developments and operated by Acacia Care.
For more information on the site at Oundle Road, click here or read the BBC press coverage here.
