BULLDOZERS have levelled a seafront restaurant that’s stood at the heart of a planning wrangle for more than six years.

Swanage’s Gee Whites bar was torn down on Wednesday, two years after Purbeck District Council’s planning department ruled against retrospective permission for its existing thatched canopy.

Owner Mick Storer, who does have planning consent for a new building with a state-of-the-art glass roof, had hoped to strike a deal to allow his seafront bar to remain as it was.

But after this deal failed to materialise he decided to finally throw in the towel and start from scratch.

“After initial hostilities with the planning department we had been working together,” said Mick. “When they ruled against the thatch in 2011 we came to a reasonable compromise and they gave me a reasonable amount of time.

“We talked to them this summer and they agreed, with some conditions, to give us an additional year. But I’d had enough of all the mucking about so decided to take it down now.”

Mick hopes the new look Gee Whites, in-line with the glass canopy-design agreed with council planners, will be finished on the same quayside site by the end of March 2014.

He said: “I got over it a few weeks ago after I made the initial decision. I’d have kept it the way it was because I thought it was fantastic, but you cannot have everything.

“Once I knew there was no coming back it sank in. I really wish I didn’t have to do it, but I’ll get over it.”

Gee Whites has been embroiled in a planning dispute since 2007, when Mick first erected a thatched pagoda.

During that time hundreds of customers have written letters of support for the restaurant.