Ugly Enough? Alsager Verus 207K SF BAE Systems Development

Is it possible to build uglier buildings if the location is itself already fairly ugly? Is there a sliding scale of permissable architectural outrage?

These theories are now being tested by Cheshire East Council in the architecturally unspectacular town of Alsager. A 207K SF development by BAE Systems is the catalyst.

Locals argue that the development is too ugly for Alsager and secured its rejection at an earlier meeting of the council's planning committee. The committee decided that the design failed to achieve  "a sense of place" by protecting and enhancing the quality, distinctiveness and character of Alsager, Insider reports.

The site forms a buffer between homes and other BAE Systems sites, locals said. BAE Systems said the development is in keeping with the neighbourhood, and will provide jobs.

The main changes to this application, following the refusal of the earlier application, are two metres of extra landscape buffer along Crewe Road, moving landscaping and massing out of post-approval discussions and into the substantive planning application. This imposes maximum heights of 13.5 metres, and reduces the floorspace by 3K SF, council documents reveal.

Does Alsager have a distinctive architectural character? The council will have to decide.

The town has a slender crop of buildings judged worthy of protection: There are just eight listed buildings, all but one of the lowest variety.

Nikolaus Pevsner, whose brisk appraisal of every town in the land provides the backbone of the famous Buildings of England series, thought the Georgian church (1789-90) was pleasant, but the Catholic Church was judged "of no interest," and the dominant buildings of what is now Manchester Metropolitan University's Alsager campus were dismissed with the acid line "Remarkable for quantity but not quality — architectural quality." Pevsner refrained from remarking on the town as a whole, an omission heavy with judgment.