Alternative urged to city multi-storey car park

Local campaigners are pressing for Hereford’s bus station to be turned into new housing rather than a multi-storey car park.

Lying between Commercial Road and the county hospital, the bus station will no longer be needed once city transport hub in front of the railway station, on which work is expected to start imminently, is completed.

Herefordshire Council has said it is looking at reviving a dormant plan to create a multi-storey car park on the site, which would make up for the likely loss of parking at Merton Meadow where new housing is already planned.

But the council has said it is waiting on a review of parking in the city, which was due to be published in December, before committing to any changes in the city’s car parks.

Ahead of this, Hereford Civic Society has worked up a plan for 33 affordable townhouses and flats for the site, of two and three storeys and arranged around a garden square, and is urging the council to consider this instead.

The group’s plan would preserve as a focus the grade II listed Governor’s House, the last remnant of the former city gaol and currently home to a shop and café.

With solar roofs, the houses could be candidates for the Passivhaus energy sustainability standard, according to the society’s chair Jeremy Milln, who added the multi-storey plan would “create conflict with pedestrians” in an area “already dominated by car parking”.

Last October the council said it would “explore the construction of a new multi-storey car park on the current bus station site to serve the needs of hospital staff, visitors and contractors, as well as to provide additional car parking capacity to support the railway station and town centre”.