Wymondham allotments: 190 plots proposed off Tuttles Lane

Wymondham Town Council has applied to build the town a new allotment site, on 8.35 acres of arable land north of Tuttles Lane West. The provisional layout has 190 plots.

It is a replacement. The council’s own papers say 131 plot holders lost their plots when the Chapel Lane allotments closed, and about 60 households are on the waiting list behind them.

Comments on the application close on Tuesday 29 September. When we checked the register on 14 September, nobody had commented.

Why Chapel Lane went

The town council leased about 7.4 acres at Chapel Lane. Its site selection statement says the land “has now been reclaimed by Anglian Water to facilitate essential infrastructure upgrades at the Wymondham Water Recycling Centre”, required under the Water Industry National Environment Programme. The site has closed.

The council’s two documents do not agree on how many gardeners that displaced. The site selection statement says 131 plot holders. The planning justification statement filed the same day says 137. Both give the waiting list as around 60 households.

What is proposed

The application, reference 2026/2374, is for land roughly 70 metres north of Tuttles Lane, the B1135, in the North Wymondham ward. The whole site is 3.3 hectares. The agent is Canham Consulting of Norwich.

The landscape and visual appraisal filed with the application sets out the scheme:

• 2.57 hectares of allotment plots, about 190 of them in the provisional layout, divided by 2 metre mown grass paths
• a new access road off Tuttles Lane, 3.1 metres wide with passing places and a crushed aggregate surface
• a car park with 44 spaces plus 4 accessible spaces
• a community shed with a decking area and a plant swap space, and a 20ft storage container
• four water storage tanks, 2.6 metres high, and bulk bins for compost and mulch
• 2 metre deer-proof fencing around the perimeter of the plots
• about 285 metres of new native hedge and roughly 4,750 square metres of species-rich meadow grassland

Plot holders would be allowed their own sheds, polytunnels, fruit cages and water tanks, to guidelines, with nothing over 2.5 metres tall. The council expects the main construction to take one to three months.

There is no mains water. The application proposes rainwater harvesting across the site, topped up by a solar-powered borehole limited to less than 40 cubic metres a week and running only in the growing season. The planning justification statement says the water supply is funded in part by local business donations, fundraising and a Lottery grant.

The accessibility offer

This is the part of the scheme that reads as a deliberate change from the old site. The application promises:

• main paths 2 metres wide and level
• easy access plots with raised beds 60 to 90 centimetres high
• gates at least 1 metre wide on those plots
• a water point within reach of every plot
• benches around the site
• disabled parking next to the easy access plots
• plots in a range of sizes

Why this field and not another one

The site sits in open countryside, and the town council knows that is the hard part. Its site selection statement sets out the search it made: it contacted private landowners and farmers, approached South Norfolk Council and Norfolk County Council about publicly owned land, and looked at land inside and next to the settlement boundary.

The result, in its own words, was that most landowners “did not respond” or said the land was not available, and “no suitable publicly owned land was identified”. Other land along Tuttles Lane, including near the garden centre, was ruled out by ownership. Smaller and fragmented parcels were too small, or had no safe access.

Access to the proposed site would run across a neighbouring field, referred to as Field 13, under a temporary licence from its owner. The statement says Norfolk County Council highways officers gave informal advice that this route “would likely be the most appropriate option”.

The council argues the use is low intensity and stays green, and offers hedge planting and careful layout as mitigation. Whether that overcomes the open countryside designation is what the planning officers now have to decide.

The constraints on the file

The register lists 21 constraints on the site. The ones that will shape the decision are the open countryside designation, the Wymondham Area Action Plan and the Wymondham Neighbourhood Plan, a recorded site of archaeological interest, and two landscape character areas, D1 Wymondham Settled Plateau Farmland and B2 Tiffey Tributary Farmland. The site is also inside Norwich Airport and RAF Old Buckenham safeguarding zones, which normally matter only for tall structures.

What it means for you

• The deadline is Tuesday 29 September. Comments go through the planning register entry for 2026/2374. The press advertisement period runs on to 8 October, but the neighbour and standard consultation both expire on the 29th.
• The council’s target decision date is 3 December 2026. Nothing is built before then, and an approval would be followed by one to three months of construction.
• If you want a plot, the waiting list is held by Wymondham Town Council, not by South Norfolk Council.
• If you live on Tuttles Lane West, the access road, the 44 space car park and the two short sections of hedge to be removed for the entrance are the details to read. The drawings are all on the register under the documents tab.
• More Wymondham applications, week by week, are on our Wymondham planning news page.