Published30 June 2026Updated1 July 2026
Approved Twice, Built Never: But now there's 14 Apartments coming to Regent Street, Kimberley
Planning permission is supposed to be the hard bit. Try telling that Kimberley House, which has bagged it twice and built absolutely nothing.
Planning permission is supposed to be the hard part. The final boss. So spare a thought for Kimberly House on Regent Street in Kimberley, which has beaten it twice and built absolutely nothing.
Two permissions, no homes. That's the planning equivalent of winning the lottery twice and forgetting to cash the ticket.
We've had a third go at it. Fourteen apartments this time, taken to Broxtowe Borough Council for a pre-application steer, and the response came back grinning: principle, scale, design, the lot. Lovely. But the part worth your time isn't that a planning officer liked a nice drawing. It's why two perfectly valid permissions spent years doing a convincing impression of a car park.
First, the building. Brace yourself.
Picture the ugliest thing on an otherwise handsome Victorian street. Now make it bigger. That's our site: a former cinema turned light industrial shed, flat-roofed, pebble-dashed in a shade best described as “weathered disappointment”, and about as welcome on the street as a skip nobody's come to collect.
Round the back it's worse. A great blank wall leans over the gardens on James Street, hoovering up the daylight and any lingering optimism. When a planning inspector looked at the site in 2024, the warmest thing they could muster was that it makes a “neutral” contribution to the Conservation Area next door. Neutral. For a building this size, that's the architectural version of “lovely personality”.
Two permissions, two ways to build nothing
Here's where it gets silly. By the time our client, Elite Derbyshire Developments, took the site on, it already had planning consent. Not once, but twice.
Permission one: turn the existing building into 14 flats (ref 23/00425/PMAP32, confirmed on appeal in April 2024). Great, on paper. In the real world, carving decent flats out of an industrial shell this size costs a small fortune, and Kimberley one-beds don't sell for a small fortune. The permission was real, but the maths took one look and left.
Permission two: knock it down and put up 12 supported-living flats (ref 24/00399/FUL, March 2025). Also real, also approved, also going nowhere. Supported living needs a registered care provider, CQC sign-off and usually a slug of public funding, the sort of package a small private developer can't rustle up on a Tuesday afternoon. Two permissions. Two dead ends. Nought homes.
Which lands us on the question everyone keeps skipping. Round here, getting planning permission plainly isn't the hard part. You could nod one through in your sleep. The hard part, the bit nobody had cracked, is designing something the owner can afford to build while still making the sums add up.
So we designed one that leaves the drawing board
Elite aren't a build-it-and-flog-it outfit. They put things up, keep them, and run them for years. That knocks out the clever, expensive, subsidy-dependent options straight away and leaves one honest answer: plain, ordinary, general-needs apartments. The only sort an owner can fund, fill and manage without a care contract, a government grant, or a conversion bill with a nasty surprise waiting at the bottom.
So out goes the shed. In its place, a 2.5-storey building: 14 apartments, 12 one-beds and two two-beds, every one hitting or beating national space standards. The design earns its keep. Double gables front and back borrow the roofline rhythm of the Victorian terraces, so the new building nods at its neighbours rather than shouting over them. The rear steps back as it climbs, so it stops looming over the James Street gardens the way the old wall does. The cars go underneath, in an undercroft, tidily out of sight. And the stone bays and string courses tip a wink to the older houses down the road, stopping well short of fancy-dress Victoriana
What Broxtowe made of it
One caveat before anyone uncorks anything: a pre-app is guidance, not a decision, and the council's the first to say so. Nobody's signed anything. Fine.
With that out of the way, the response was about as warm as these things come. Principle of homes on the site: accepted. Massing, scale and height: fine. The gabled roof: backed, and named as the likely favourite over the flat-roof version we'd floated to test the water. The conservation officer, whose entire job is to fret about the Conservation Area next door, had only limited concerns. Layout and design: appropriate at 2.5 storeys.
For a building sitting cheek by jowl with a Conservation Area, and a whisker taller than the last thing they approved, that's a cracking hand to be dealt.
The catches (there are always catches)
A pre-app that comes back with no questions is a pre-app nobody bothered reading. This one got read, cover to cover.
Three storeys? No. We'd asked, cheekily, whether a full third floor might sneak in a few more flats. The answer, politely put, was that it would loom over the street and 2.5 storeys sits better. Fair enough. Better to hear it now than after posting off the application fee.
Parking and privacy are the live ones. For general-needs flats the highways team would rather see nearer a space per home, and we're offering 13 for 14, so a transport assessment has to go and earn that last one. The rear windows facing James Street need careful placing. The raised terrace at the back has to be designed so nobody can stand on it and have a good long look at the neighbours. There's old ground to test for contamination and contributions to settle. Bread-and-butter for a site like this.
None of it's a shock. None of it kills the scheme. It's the to-do list you want from a pre-app: short, specific, and on your desk before you've spent anything that stings to lose.
Why this is the one that gets built
Kimberley's behind on the homes it's meant to be delivering: roughly 600 wanted by 2028, somewhere around 241 built so far. Fourteen flats won't fix that alone, and we're not going to stand here pretending otherwise. But fourteen real homes comfortably beats this plot's lifetime tally, which is a proud and consistent zero. That's the whole point. Shrink the scheme and you don't get a smaller building. On this site, with this owner, you get a bare plot and a third permission quietly gathering dust beside the other two.
faq's
Common Questions
2-4 Regent Street, Kimberley, Nottinghamshire. The plan's to demolish a redundant former-cinema building, latterly light industrial, and put up a 2.5-storey building of 14 apartments (12 one-bed, 2 two-bed) with parking tucked underneath.
Not yet. This is a pre-application proposal. Broxtowe Borough Council's pre-application response (ref 26/10059/ENQ) backed the principle, scale and design, but pre-app advice isn't a decision. A formal application's on the way. The site does hold two earlier approvals for different schemes, neither of which was built.
The prior approval for converting the existing building into 14 flats didn't stack up financially. The full permission for 12 supported-living flats needed a registered care provider and funding a private developer can't assemble. The current scheme's general-needs housing, which an independent long-term owner can deliver.
Parking provision and a supporting transport assessment, privacy detailing to the rear windows facing James Street, contaminated-land testing, and developer contributions. The three-storey option floated at pre-app wasn't supported, so the scheme stays at 2.5 storeys.
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