Café at site of Fly Rentals, off Lords Walk Roundabout, at RAF Lakenheath, rejected by West Suffolk Council

A new café formed of two storage containers on the site of a car dealership has been rejected by planners who said it would detract from the ‘intrinsic character and beauty of the countryside’.

Bogan Dupir’s proposals for the site occupied by Fly Rentals, on the land at the Lords Walk roundabout, in RAF Lakenheath, near Brandon, were rejected by West Suffolk Council on Tuesday.

They would have seen the containers added to the land for the café, as well as five digital signs around the site and a replacement water treatment plant.

The containers would have been side by side and been converted to provide a small kitchen, seating area and toilet.

The signs would have advertised both the car rental business and the new restaurant. The business predominantly serves the base, and is around 100m away from it.

The Ministry of Defence gave no objection to the plans.

Eriswell Parish Council strongly opposed the proposals and submitted a six-page objection to planners.

It said the plans were the third business application since 2019, suggested it would amount to industrialisation by stealth and, had the project been applied for as a whole at the start, it was ‘likely it would have been rejected’.

The private sector housing and environmental health team said there was not enough information in the application to work out whether the proposed use would be acceptable in terms of residential amenity.

Five letters of public objection were submitted over the course of the application.

Planners said adding two containers, alongside an existing unit associated with a car wash, did not respect the character of the area and would cause an urbanised feel in the countryside.

In their refusal, planners said the design, form and materials of the containers were not in keeping with the surroundings and would detract from the ‘intrinsic character and beauty of the countryside’.

They added the proposals did not show evidence of enough parking spaces and, altogether, the plans represented an ‘unsustainable form of development’, which did not safeguard residential amenity.