Sutton Council is recommending approval for a three-storey block of eight flats on the historic site of a former convent burial ground in Worcester Park.
The plans for Memorial Gardens, off Carters Close, have attracted objections from households in the surrounding area, with parking availability and pressure on local streets among the main concerns.
The now overgrown plot served a local convent until burials ceased in 1966, with all human remains later exhumed from the site and relocated under a licence granted in 2018.
The plans propose a single detached building containing eight homes, including three three-bedroom flats, three two-bedroom flats and two studio apartments. The building will have a traditional sloping roof, balconies on the upper floors, and eight off-street parking spaces.
Sutton’s chief planner, Ann Biggs, has recommended that councillors approve the proposals when the application comes up in next week’s planning meeting. In her report, Ms Biggs concluded that “the proposed development is acceptable in land use terms as it would enable the delivery of new homes in a suitable location”.
However, parking availability and the potential for increased pressure on local streets from additional residents and visitors have emerged as key points of contention.
Sutton’s Highways Officer warned in a council report that “overnight parking stress in the surrounding streets already exceeds acceptable capacity thresholds.”
They added that the proposed eight flats “will exacerbate this issue.”
Residents have also raised concerns about parking in their objection letters. Carters Close resident, Jane Stone, told the council that the application fails to account for the introduction of yellow lines in the surrounding estate, which further restricts local parking.
She added: “In my view, the level of parking proposed for the development is wholly inadequate. The proposal appears to be based on the assumption that each dwelling will generate only one vehicle. This is unrealistic.”
Yet despite this, officials insisted the application could not legally be refused on transport grounds under national planning policy.
Current planning rules dictate that a development can only be rejected on highway grounds where its cumulative impact on the road network is considered “severe” — a threshold officers say the proposed eight flats do not meet.
Sutton received 23 letters of objection from residents across Carters Close, Creston Way, Handside Close and Southwood Close. Alongside concerns over parking, neighbours have argued that the scale and intensity of the proposed development would be out of character with the surrounding area.
Their concerns follow Sutton Council’s rejection of a significantly smaller proposal for three houses on the same site in August 2025. That scheme was refused due to inadequate private amenity space, concerns about overspill parking, and potential harm to a protected oak tree.
However, the latest plans include a series of measures intended to protect the site’s leafy character and the oak tree’s roots. To safeguard the protected trees, the developers have proposed using specialised low-impact foundations and above-ground driveways to avoid digging into the roots.
Environmental conditions would also require bespoke wildlife features to be built into the new homes, including bee bricks, two bat bricks and three swift bricks.
While six of the larger flats would have private balconies, the two studio apartments would have no private outdoor amenity space. Planners have pointed to nearby Mayflower Park as an alternative source of public green space.
Sutton Council typically safeguards land needed to meet the borough’s future burial space requirements. However, because the site was privately owned by a convent and has been disused since 1966, it falls outside those protections, allowing it to be considered for residential development as brownfield land.
Overall, Sutton’s officers believe the development would provide “a satisfactory level of accommodation” while making use of brownfield land to help meet the borough’s housing targets.
Planning committee members will meet next week on October 7 to decide whether planning permission should be granted.
