Up to 100 homes and a 60-bed hotel could be built on merchant and timber engineering specialist Pattrick & Thompson’s largely mothballed King’s Lynn site if planning is approved.
The company, part of the Bo’ness, West Lothian-based Walker Timber Group, transferred main operations to the former Swiftwood site in Wisbech around two years ago. These included mouldings and timber frame component manufacture, as well as its original merchanting activities.
According to a local industry source, the King’s Lynn site has since been kept open, but only as a “timber trade centre”.
Now Walker Commercial Properties (WCP), which is based at the same address as the Walker Timber Group but is a separate limited liability company, has applied for permission to develop the 3.3-acre site. The proposal includes 93 flats for private sale, 19 for social housing and six town houses. The hotel would incorporate retail space at ground floor level.
WCP said that the site’s dockland/river frontage gave it potential to become a “significant public amenity space within the surroundings of the town centre”.
It also said that it had to be a high-density development due to “poor ground conditions and flooding issues and associated costs”.
“A lower-density proposal would make the site unviable and unmarketable,” it said.
The planning statement added that the location was no longer “fit for purpose as a timber yard given the limitations for industrial use in the town centre” and that the operation was being relocated to Pattrick & Thompson’s “dedicated engineering facility in Wisbech”.
A Walker Timber Group spokesperson declined to comment on the proposals but said that the planning and development process could take another five years to come to fruition.
