New A1 Gosforth services near McDonald’s spark fears traffic jams will be worse than ever
A new service station close to the A1 in Gosforth could be given the green light this week, despite dozens of objections.
Councillors are set to decide on Friday whether to allow new roadside services, including a drive-through coffee shop, to be built in the north of Newcastle.
Plans awaiting approval from Newcastle City Council would see the development, which would also feature a filling station, car wash and EV charging points, located on a field off Rotary Way – opposite the Falcon’s Nest pub and McDonald’s.
More than 80 objections have been lodged against the project, with locals fearing that the scheme would add to traffic jams in what is already a busy area next to the motorway.
The drive-through would operate 6am to midnight and the filling station would be open 24/7.
However, city planners are recommending that planning permission is granted ahead of a meeting of the city council’s planning committee this Friday.
A previous version of the plans, from Brookfield Property (Holdings) Limited, was rejected by the council in 2023 on grounds of overdevelopment and harm to the environment.
Since then, the applicant has revised its designs to include just a single drive-through unit instead of two, cut the number of parking spaces, add some solar panels, and plant more trees and shrubs around the site.
Among the 82 objections to the latest plans, the three Liberal Democrat councillors for the Parklands ward warned: “This part of North Gosforth is already very busy, and the amount of traffic using the junction has increased quite substantially over the past few years due to the large number of houses that have been built in the area recently, in both Newcastle and North Tyneside. This has led to traffic jams at peak times, and we regularly see many traffic hold ups in the area. This has led to concerns among residents who live nearby that their lives are going to be severely impacted by the increased traffic that could be using the area if this planning application is approved. Increased traffic would lead to increased noise and increased air pollution which is surely unacceptable in a residential area.”
Other objectors called the service station “completely unnecessary”, given that there is another petrol station on the other side of Rotary Way, and of “no benefit to local people”.
However, city planners say that the development would have “minimal” traffic impact as well as “no direct noise impacts” to nearby houses.
In its planning application, the developer said that it would plant 91 new tress, 159 shrubs, and 421m of new hedgerows, as well as new meadow grassland “to ensure significant ecological enhancements are delivered”.
It adds: “Careful consideration has been given to the design of the roadside services to ensure it responds to the existing site context to provide a balance of functional capacity and the preservation of the environment and local amenity. At the scale proposed, the development will sit comfortably within the extent of the site retaining as much of the existing landscape as possible and whilst allowing for extensive replacement planting and new habitat creation.”