Plans to develop one of the world’s top ten visitor attractions in London are set to be submitted by the end of the year, our Kent Development Plans Conference has heard. The resort, which is due to be developed on the Swanscombe Peninsula that juts out into the Thames Estuary on the north Kent coast, would attract up to 12 million visits per annum.

At the conference Andy Martin of London Resort said that statutory consultation would be held in the spring adding: “It’s taken longer than we would have thought but projects like this never run smoothly. This is a global resort that will be very different to anything else in Britain.”

Designs for the core resort, which aims to create a visitor attraction on a scale to rival Disneyland Paris, are due to be worked up throughout the rest of this year in the run up to the development consent order (DCO) application. As well as the core resort and food areas London Resort’s masterplan included space for 3,750 hotel rooms, which he predicted would be filled based on other equivalent resorts where accommodation gets booked up six months in advance.

The scheme will generate employment for 6,000 construction workers on site and 10,000 full time equivalent jobs when it was up and running, and Andy Martin expressed confidence that there would be demand for the resort, which will be served by Ebbsfleet railway station that is only a 17 minutes train journey from central London.

Alison Broom, Chief Executive of Maidstone Borough Council, said that there was progress on the redevelopment of the town’s former Royal Mail sorting office following the appointment of a masterplanner, who is due to report back in June. The Maidstone East site, which is being brought forward in a joint venture with Kent County Council, is being lined up for a mixed-use development containing ‘several hundred’ new homes, shops and offices, which the public sector is likely to occupy.

She also said that masterplanning was about to kick off on the Ghurkas and Royal Engineer barracks at Invicta Park, which has been identified as a location for 1,300 new homes, 500 of which are due to come forward in Maidstone council’s current local plan period.

The event also heard that Highways England is on track to submit plans next year for the new Lower Thames Crossing between South Essex and North Kent. Rob Audsley, project manager for the crossing at Highways England, told delegates that the agency expected to submit a draft application for a DCO in the third quarter of 2019 following a statutory consultation exercise later this year, with aims to begin construction in 2021, which will contain three lanes in each direction, and open it by 2027.

He said that the agency had launched a major procurement exercise in December to identify a main works contractor for what is expected to be one of the south east’s major infrastructure projects.

Mahbub Khandoker, development director of Countryside, told delegates that work on the Rochester Riverside site, which has been in the planning process for nearly 15 years, was due to kick off on February 5th.

The sales and marketing suite will open in late September 2018 for the site, which is being developed by a joint venture between Countryside and Hyde Housing Group that will manage the 25% of units lined up for affordable housing. Outline planning permission was granted for the entire site last October, together with detailed consent for the first three phases comprising 489 homes.

Khandoker said the dwellings will be equally divided between houses and apartment blocks, the maximum height of which will be six storeys. The scheme also features an 81-bed hotel, for which he said an operator has been identified, a new primary school, office space and a number of retail units.

Professor Callum Firth, Dean of the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University, told the conference about plans for a new engineering centre. He said Canterbury Christ Church had secured planning permissions for a new building and was currently tendering for detail design work. He said that the new building, which is scheduled to open for new students in September 2020, aimed to redress the shortage of engineering graduates in the north Kent saying: “Companies kept telling us that the greatest problem is finding the staff to keep the business going.”