New street with its ‘own identity’ to be built in Oldham

Oldham could soon get a new, much-needed street of family houses.

Developer Saeed Ahmed, director of Hafiz Construction & Management, has been granted planning permission to build 14 four, five and six-bed houses in Werneth.

Once built, the properties will be arranged around an estate cul-de-sac road accessed from Cambridge Street. Each house will have its own garden and private parking space. 

A council report noted the homes would be ‘noticeably larger than the surrounding dwellings but would form their own identity in this cul-de-sac arrangement’.

The development (pictured below) is bound by Durham Street to the east and Norfolk Street to the south, and backs onto the mosque and local shops on Cambridge St. 

The new houses are on brownfield land and the site of former community green space previously owned by the council. But the land was sold to another developer in 2014 and now no longer contains any ‘significant vegetation’, according to a town planner Dave Richards. 

In the report, Richards wrote: “The site generally lays to scrubland which has the air of a site primed for redevelopment and has little in the way of intrinsic value to the character and appearance of the area. The site has been chosen to deliver housing.” 

The council considered a £3,843 contribution via a Section 106 agreement – a method the local authority can use to secure funds to invest in open spaces and greens. But ultimately the town planners decided the contribution would make the project ‘unviable’. 

The application has also been excluded from contributions to affordable housing. 

Previously, a similar site was granted planning permission to build 37 detached buildings in 2014. 

The large homes could help alleviate Oldham’s desperate need for homes for larger families, with the area struggling with overcrowding in small terraced houses. Around 7.5 per cent of houses in Oldham were overcrowded in the last Census – well above the 4.4 pc national average.