CAT groomers, bakers and candlestick makers will be able to rent an office for a month at a time to grow their business at their own speed in a rebooted Grove Business Park.

A trio of property investors who snapped up the 32-acre site just outside Wantage in December for an estimated £10m have revealed plans to relaunch it as an incubator to grow small start-ups into big businesses.

The group, who now control 200,000sq ft of offices and light industrial units employing some 400 workers, have said they will be applying for planning permission to double the number of buildings on site to 400,000sq ft.

They will begin by building a small number of new units speculatively and advertising the vacancies, but for the rest of the space they will invite eager entrepreneurs and already flourishing firms to make expressions of interest then build tailor-made offices to suit different business's needs, they said.

Group development manager Richard Lyall, who comes from Somerset, revealed his plans at a public meeting in Grove on Wednesday night.

He told the meeting: "There will be folk locally with enterprising new ideas that want to set up a cat grooming parlour or a shop selling candles on eBay.

"What we plan to do is form a hub with a variety of sizes of accommodation - it could be a very small office or a small manufacturing facility.

"As these people grow their business they can move up to a larger property on the site.

"The idea is that nobody should have cause to move out, nobody should ever say 'we've outgrown this'.

"We want it at a level where people can actually afford to stay here and not go to Milton Park."

He said the group would start by spending £500,000 refurbishing a 20,000sq ft business centre at the heart of the park which is already home to a variety of companies, and build a new cafe there.

Mr Lyall said his group, which owns offices in Brighton and Hastings and shops in Windsor, had recognised that with the amount of housing planned for Oxfordshire - 100,000 new homes in the next 15 years - the park presented an obvious business opportunity.

He said they had already received "a lot of interest" in its proposals.

However, he also admitted the group has put up a mandatory maintenance charge at the park.

He refused to reveal how much business were now being charged, saying that each paid a different amount, but he said "in percentage terms it might seem a lot, but the change is in terms of pennies".

Oxfordshire County Councillor for Wantage and Grove Jenny Hannaby grilled Mr Lyall at the meeting as to whether his group genuinely planned to "stay the course" or get planning permission then sell the site for a profit.

Mr Lyall said: "We're not here to develop properties then sell them and run off into the sunset: we generally keep the properties, grow the business and hold onto things for a long time."

He also promised that his group would try and help those businesses already in the park, which include a gym, a physiotherapy equipment manufacturer and Wantage police station, but warned: "We hope people can bear with us until these buildings are built".