£3m lifeboat station plan in new storm (From Western Telegraph)

£3m lifeboat station plan in new storm

THE proposed design of Tenby's new £3 million lifeboat station has provoked controversial comments from national organisations.

The development, off Castle Hill on the site of the former Royal Victoria Pier, would be over three times bigger than the existing structure.

Although the need for the building is not in dispute, its planned appearance has been coming under fire since earlier this year, when some members of Tenby Town Council called it 'a blot on the landscape' and 'a massive cattle shed'.

Community action group Tenby 2020 has now voiced concern at the 'pseudo-boatshed design' of the copper-roofed, cedarwood-clad building, calling for a more modern design with more extensive use of glass.

The Welsh School of Architecture also feels that the structure is unnecessarily bulky, and the School's Professor M. C. Parry has told the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority that without the slipway 'it might be imagined that this is a design for a small town library'.

He claims that the buildings most significant failure is its 'form and fenestration', all in the manner of something which has been designed on land.

The Park Authority's development control committee held a site inspection at the end of last month, before which they met representatives of the RNLI and consulting engineers Posford Duvivier.

A report of the meeting was before members at their meeting on Monday, together with an update of the latest correspondence on the application.

The committee was told that Park officers would be answering the 'various, and in many cases, interesting' points on the building's design in a report to the September meeting, in the light of ongoing discussions. q Tenby's new lifeboat station would be the RNLI's first new station of the millennium, and is needed to house the new generation of larger, faster and heavier slipway craft, currently undergoing sea trials. It would also allow launching at any state of the tide.

If the go-ahead is given, work is scheduled to start on the development in Autumn 2002, with completion in Spring 2004.

Caption: A model of the proposed new Tenby lifeboat station. PICTURE: Gareth Davies Photography.