The green light has finally been given to flatten the old Weetwood Police Station on Otley Road in north Leeds and replace it with a block of 127 flats, after the developer quietly tied up the loose ends on a legal agreement with the council. This decision, rubber-stamped on April 15 following an initial nod back in January 2025, means Weetwood Developments Ltd is now clear to demolish the former cop shop and build an L-shaped residential tower ranging from four to six storeys high.
Frankly, the approval feels like yet another tick-box exercise in a city that simply cannot stop cramming high-density housing onto every scrap of brownfield land, regardless of whether the local infrastructure can handle it. The existing buildings on the site, which have been earning their keep as a TV production base and a nursery since the police moved out in 2020, are now destined for the crusher to make way for what the planners insist on calling a ‘work from home area’ near the entrance. Big deal. Throwing in a desk and a plug socket doesn’t excuse the lack of genuine community amenity.
The locals at the Adel Neighbourhood Forum saw right through this, lodging formal objections over the sheer bulk and ugly design of the proposal, but as usual, the council’s planning officers brushed aside the aesthetic concerns. What’s more worrying is the complete fudge over road safety. Anyone who has ever tried to navigate the Lawnswood roundabout during rush hour knows it’s a bloody nightmare. Between 2020 and 2024, this junction recorded 25 injuries, including six serious ones. It’s a major bottleneck on the A660 Otley Road and the A6120 Outer Ring Road, and you’re telling me chucking another 127 flats worth of cars into that mix is a smart move?
Sure, Leeds City Council has finally started a 12-month revamp of that junction to turn it into a signalised roundabout with segregated cycle lanes and lower speed limits, dropping from 70mph down to 40 and 50mph zones. But residents are already branding that scheme a waste of money and predicting permanent traffic chaos while the works are ongoing. You have to question the timing and the logic. Fixing a dangerous road is one thing, but approving a massive residential development right next to a construction site that will be gridlocked for a year is just poor forward planning.
Then there is the usual stench of hypocrisy regarding affordable housing. The developer has managed to wriggle out of making a meaningful contribution, a fact that the Neighbourhood Forum highlighted but which the council conveniently ignored. While the council boasts about its Council Housing Growth Programme, which has built over 350 new homes since 2018 in places like Gipton, and keeps banging on about net zero targets with air source heat pumps, this Weetwood project looks like a standard private rental cash grab. Leeds is currently seeing a boom in residential and student accommodation starts, with the Deloitte Crane Survey showing that residential units under construction are at the highest volume since records began. The city’s economy is shifting hard towards housing and away from offices, but the vast majority of these new builds are unaffordable for the average local earner.
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Weetwood Developments claims this new population will generate “additional activity and spending” in the local economy. That is developer-speak for “we don’t care about the strain on local GPs, school places, or the fact that the traffic is already __cked.” Until the council grows a spine and starts demanding proper Section 106 contributions and genuinely affordable units instead of just nodding through every L-shaped block that comes across the desk, long-term residents are right to be cynical. This isn’t regeneration; it’s just maximising density at the expense of liveability.
Crime & Courts Correspondent
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