29th August 2026
Before a single brick was laid at Harcourt Street, the site itself carried three separate, and partly conflicting, designations under Stockport’s Unitary Development Plan. It was allocated as a Proposed School Site — but it was also designated Local Open Space, protected under policy UOS1.3, and part of a Green Chain, protected under policy NE3.1. Two of those three designations exist specifically to stop development like this happening. The third required it.
That conflict didn’t go unnoticed at the time — it’s set out in the council’s own planning policy background to the application. But a proposed school site sitting on top of protected open space and a protected green chain doesn’t resolve itself. Something had to justify treating the loss of that protection as acceptable.
That something was the promise of continued public sporting and recreational access. Rather than treating the school as simply overriding the site’s open space and green chain protections, the case for approval rested on the idea that what replaced the land — new sports facilities made available to the community — would still serve the underlying purpose those protections were there for: keeping usable open space and recreational provision available to local people.
In other words, the public access promise wasn’t an added bonus attached to an otherwise straightforward school application. It was the specific justification for allowing development to proceed on land the council’s own plan said should be protected from it.
That makes the question of whether that public access was ever actually delivered more than a matter of an unfulfilled aspiration. If the promised community sporting provision never materialised — and a direct enquiry to the school today found none — then the reasoning used to override this site’s Local Open Space and Green Chain protections in the first place never actually came to pass either. The trade-off that made the departure from the council’s own adopted planning policy acceptable appears, on the evidence available now, not to have happened.
