The brief
The Landscape Workshop was appointed to prepare an LVIA in support of a planning application for 22 residential dwellings on Land off New Road, Ash Green, Nuneaton. The site sits at 111m AOD on the south-western fringe of Ash Green, within the West Midlands Green Belt, on a transitional sliver of land that performs a specific and politically sensitive role — maintaining a perceived gap between Ash Green and Keresley Newlands.
The scheme comprised 22 homes with access, parking and landscaped amenity space, a retained green buffer to the north, and an integrated planting framework designed to reinforce the site's existing vegetative boundaries. The LVIA had to grapple honestly with the Green Belt sensitivity while also reflecting the site's genuinely degraded, urban-fringe condition.
The landscape and visual context
At the national scale the site lies in NCA 97 Arden — a rolling, well-wooded farmland landscape of mature hedgerow oaks, ancient woodlands and historic parklands associated with Shakespeare's Forest of Arden. At the county scale it sits within Industrial Arden, a sub-region where extractive and industrial legacies overlay the older wooded framework, and is adjacent to North Warwickshire LCA Character Area 7 (Church End to Corley — Arden Hills and Valleys). Locally, it falls within LCA7 Keresley Urban Fringe as defined in the 2023 Nuneaton and Bedworth Landscape Character Assessment, an area explicitly characterised as having weak character and poor condition, fragmented by roads and intervisible settlement edges.
The site itself is an intensively overgrazed equestrian field — around 40% bare earth — bounded by species-poor hedges with some early-mature oak and ash, a mature oak target tree, and stables and muck heaps around its edges. Breach Brook lies to the north. The M6 and A444 exert strong acoustic and visual influence. Ten representative viewpoints were assessed, including the Coventry Way, PRoW 331 B8/3, 331 B14a/1, 331 B14/2, 331 B14/3, 331 B31/4, M311 through Bunsons Wood, and several road-level receptors along New Road. In the majority of these views the site is screened entirely by mature roadside vegetation, intervening topography or buildings.
Our approach
Two realities had to be reconciled. The Green Belt designation gave the site a statutory sensitivity it would not otherwise have earned — the actual landscape fabric is previously developed, weakly structured and already visually hemmed in by urban edges. The assessment therefore distinguished carefully between designation-led sensitivity and measurable landscape quality, and then tested whether a well-designed scheme could still satisfy Green Belt purposes of separation and openness.
Mitigation and design response
Mitigation was built around retention of the existing mature hedgerow framework, with sufficient offset for enhancement and long-term maintenance. New native hedgerow, tree and shrub planting was specified to all boundaries to reinforce the strategic landscape structure. A substantial green buffer was retained to the north of the site, and the built footprint was deliberately pulled in from the western boundary to preserve a vegetated corridor along the perceived gap between Ash Green and Keresley Newlands. The presence of a larger building on the opposite side of New Road was used as the natural limit beyond which the settlement edge would not be extended.
The outcome
At NCA, county and local character-area scales the effects were assessed as slight adverse at Year 1, reducing to neutral by Year 10 as the reinforcement planting matured. At site level, the Year 1 effect was slight adverse, reducing to neutral by Year 10 while maintaining the Green Belt's functions of separation and openness. Visual effects followed a similar pattern: most viewpoints recorded neutral or slight adverse effects at Year 1, with moderate adverse effects confined to three close-range receptors along New Road, all reducing to slight adverse or neutral by Year 10. The conclusion was robust: a small residential scheme, carefully sited within an already fragmented urban-fringe landscape, could be accommodated without materially eroding the landscape pattern or the essential Green Belt role of maintaining separation between Ash Green and Keresley Newlands.
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