The delayed plans by Fraser Garages to open a petrol filling station with car wash and convenience store selling local produce on the Marlborough Business Park were given welcome approval on Monday by the town council.
It’s planning committee backed the initiative of the Oxford-based company, which runs a chain of six garages, to go head to head in competition with Deans, the London Road garage that serves local motorists.
As the only garage in Marlborough, Deans has been described and heavily criticised for charging the highest prices in Wiltshire – currently £144.90 a litre for diesel and £138.90 for leaded petrol.
“I am very impressed with the people who run Frasers,” Councillor Nick Fogg told the planning committee. “We used to have four or five filling stations in Marlborough, but now we have only one.”
Councillor Peggy Dow added: “This will be an asset for the town. We desperately need another filling station – and one with cheaper petrol than is currently being charged.”
And in opening at the Business Park – on the site in front of the Savernake Forest Dental Practice – it will enjoy support from the 220 houses planned by the Crown Estate for a site on the opposite side of the Salisbury Road.
Both Mr Fogg and Mrs Dow are also Wiltshire councillors who have been pressing the unitary authority to take legal action against Deans owner Mr Zubair Dean for failing to repair a grade II listed property adjoining his garage.
An emergency prohibition notice was served on him in April last year, which gave him 28 days to carry out urgent repairs to the property, subsequently ordered by conservation officer Pippa Card to be boarded up.
She wrote to Marlborough town council in August declaring that a final chance was being given to Mr Dean to restore the property, which had been used for housing, or face legal action.
She indicated that their had been a transfer of the ownership of the property and it was not known who was now responsible for its upkeep.
A month later still nothing had happened and Mr Fogg again hit out at Wiltshire for failing to act, one reason said to be its lack of funding to take on legal cases and enforce the repairs to a property described as being of “national importance”.
And another town councillor claimed that a legal notice had not been served because Wiltshire had no address for Mr Dean or possibly his son, which would normally be available at Companies House.
Then the garage – and another Dean filling station on the road to Hungerford — were put up to rent, the ‘To Let’ sign still on display at the dilapidated premises.
Now it is believed that an offer to buy the Marlborough garage site, on the edge of River Kennet, and redevelop it, is believed to have been made, but no details have been revealed.
