RESIDENTS have filed a 700-name petition against a planned housing development a week after it was resubmitted to Oxford City Council.

The planning application is for ten homes on the site of the council’s depot in Bury Knowle Park and is part of the city’s Affordable Homes Project, which aims to provide 114 homes by 2015.

If planning permission is granted, the buildings will be knocked down and replaced by two one-bed flats, three two-bed flats, four two-bed flats and one three-bed flat. The application proposes a car-free development and is a resubmission of one which was previously submitted in October.

The original application was called in for review and then withdrawn after residents said a car free-development would be difficult to enforce.

They also raised concerns about over-development and the impact of extra traffic.

The new application, submitted by Turley Associates, said it had been amended to ‘positively respond to comments received’, to improve the control of vehicular access to the development and the surrounding park.

The plan says accessibility to the site for vehicles will be “robustly managed” through the introduction of a new controlled gate to prevent unauthorised entry along the tree-lined access road to the new development (other than emergency and refuse vehicles).

The chairman of the Friends of Bury Knowle Park, Rosemary Belton, said: “It sounds like an improvement, but I am still not convinced.

“I am opposed to more vehicle access to the park and think it will be a real detriment. There will still be friends of the residents driving in, taxis and food deliveries.

“People wouldn’t be able to let their children run freely.

“When we canvassed opinion in the park, very few people thought it would be a good idea.”

Bob Clarke, of Sandfield Road, said: “I am against anything they do to Bury Knowle Park.

“I am very alarmed by an occupation on the fringe of the park and I think that in five years it will be a total state.

He added: “There are already too many cars and far too much traffic.”

A petition with 700 signatures objecting to the original planning application was handed to Michael Crofton-Briggs, the council’s head of planning, on Thursday.

The council bought the entire Bury Knowle estate in 1930 for more than £11,000 and turned the grounds into a public park.

Turley Associates declined to comment when contacted by the Oxford Mail.