Cambridge University to provide land to develop Felixstowe port

CAMBRIDGE University's Trinity College, which owns large parcels of land both in the Port of Felixstowe and surrounding lands, has submitted outline proposals for an extension of Trinity Distribution Park to local and regional authorities.

The proposal would facilitate the development of a 132-hectare rail-connected logistics park within a few miles of the UK's largest container port that is said to be suffering from a "chronic shortage of land available for warehousing around the port," reports the UK's International Freighting Weekly.

Tim Collins, partner at agent Bidwells, which advises Trinity College, told IFW it was not a planning application. "This is preparatory work," he said. The college is going through a stage one engineering assessment to investigate whether the project is achievable, in terms of getting services to the site and the construction of road and rail links.

"Ultimately, Trinity College hopes this will lead to an allocation within regional planning policy that says, 'this land should be developed for port-related employment.'

He added: "There is an ongoing debate about the supply of port-related land, and we have an identifiable shortfall of land to service the port. You can't separate port growth from the proposals we are talking about here. Trinity College needs to respond to that growth trajectory."

The land development proposals concern two separate sites: the 18-hectare Christmasyard Wood area adjacent to the port and likely to be used for container storage, and a 113-hectare site at Innocence Farm, which Mr Collins described as a medium- to long-term project, the report added.

(Source:www.schednet.com)