Developers hit back over heritage society claims

The Courier, 18 March 1999

The developers behind plans for a £50 million complex at Kingask, near St Andrews, have totally rejected suggestions that they are now ‘bordering on desperation.”

Last night St Andrews Bay Development Ltd’s operations director, Iain MacKinnon, said the claim by the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland was “spurious and pejorative.”

Mr MacKinnon was responding to comments made by Glen Pride, Tayside and Fife secretary of the society, in a renewed objection to the hotel, conference, golf and leisure proposals.

Mr MacKinnon said the new, planning application for the site included a number of substantial changes from the original design, each of which was designed to address the concerns of the east area development committee.

He claimed that Mr Pride had been wrong to suggest that the new application failed to address the reasons for refusal put forward by the committee.

It was expressly at the behest of the committee, said Mr MacKinnon, that permission was now being sought for the full development rather than a phased application.

In this way, he added, the committee and the public as a whole had the opportunity to study the development plans in their entirety.

Mr MacKinnon said the hotel application had been moved inland and the movement of the spa to the steadings site was due entirely to the committee’s wish to see a greater proportion of build development in that area.

He said the spa was not, as had been implied, bigger than before but was in fact smaller.

He also said it was both incorrect and mischievous of Mr Pride to claim the result was a massive complex even bigger than the hotel. The truth was that the footprint of the steadings/spa site was 25% smaller than that of the hotel complex.

Turning to comments made about the clubhouse, Mr MacKinnon said that this was essentially a single-storey building with basement accommodation and with provision for office suites in the roof space.

The claim that the top storey incorporated luxury flats with balconies was entirely wrong.

“As to the proposed travel management scheme, Mr Pride is correct in suggesting that not all visitors would be prepared ‘To be regimented into dedicated corporate transport’ and indeed St Andrews Bay has never made such a claim,” he continued.

“What we can confirm is that such a travel management scheme operates very successfully for the large majority of our guests in other establishments and that the logistics of it have been embraced by Fife Council transportation service, who can clearly see its benefits.”