A DEVELOPER has been dealt a double blow after their latest plans for a shop site in Poole were turned down by the council – just days after their previous scheme was refused at appeal by a government planning inspector.

Fortitudo, which is run by well-known property developer Richard Carr, has submitted three planning applications to demolish the Oddbins shop in Lilliput and replace it with a four-storey block – one in 2015, which was withdrawn, one in 2018, which was refused in February this year and dismissed at appeal last week, and revised plans in February that were rejected by a council planning officer on Monday.

Oddbins closed after the wine merchant went into administration.

Fortitudo wants to build a block of eight flats on the site, with a commercial unit on the ground floor.

However, the council’s previous concerns that the proposed building would appear “cramped” on the site were not addressed in the latest set of plans.

Case officer Eleanor Godesar said while the revised proposal was better positioned along Sandbanks Road, its footprint was still too large.

Quoting planning inspector David Wyborn, who expressed similar concerns in his report on the previous scheme, she said: “In terms of scale, the inspector considered the appeal proposal to ‘have an unduly dominant and overbearing effect within the street scene.

“The mass and height of the building would relate poorly to the lower scale of built form at Brownsea Court and those adjoining residential dwellings. The resulting effect would be for the development to stand out conspicuously as a harmful overdevelopment of the site given the general scale and form of the surrounding buildings on this side of the main road’.”

It is not yet known if Fortitudo plans to submit further proposals for the site.