AN UNPOPULAR bid to build homes behind an Oxford supermarket has been rejected.

Developers Reynard Property Ltd had submitted plans to build a three-storey building housing three one-bedroom and six two-bedroom flats off Abingdon Road.

The site lies close to Tesco Express and behind the temporary car wash and was formerly used as a car park for the former Fox and Hounds pub.

Oxford City Council’s West Area planning committee rejected the application unanimously at a meeting on Tuesday.

Council officers had said the development would ‘result in an unacceptable level of overlooking into the adjoining properties’ gardens and houses to the east on Peel Place’.

Oxford Civic Society and residents from Peel Place and Weirs Lane both sent letters to the council opposing the development.

Pedestrians’ safety was also not properly considered in the application, council officers said.

A plan – which was also opposed by the county council’s highways team – was said to ‘compromise the safe movement of pedestrians and would have been to the detriment of highway amenity’.

A similar plan for nine homes on the site had been rejected by the city council in 2016.

While council officers said the previous and current plans ‘differ in terms of design...the overall form and scale of the development remain[ed] broadly similar’.

All traffic to the development would have come from a single access point onto Abingdon Road through Tesco car park.