Essex County Council's housing arm wants to replace Harlowbury Primary School's Watlington Road buildings with 10 homes, after a 42-home plan was refused.
Essex County Council’s housing company has applied to knock down Harlowbury Primary School’s buildings on Watlington Road, Old Harlow, and build 10 houses. It is the second attempt. A plan for 42 homes on a larger area of the same land was refused.
The new application, HW/FUL/26/00357, was validated on 3 September. Comments can be made until Thursday 8 October, according to the council’s planning register.
The applicant is Essex Housing Development LLP, which its planning consultants describe as “the development arm of Essex County Council”. The money raised would go towards the school’s move to a new building at Gilden Park.
What is proposed
The site is about 0.71 hectares, the southern part of the school grounds where the buildings stand. The playing fields and the paddock to the north and north west are left out this time.
The planning statement sets out the homes:
- eight three-bedroom houses built to the accessible and adaptable standard
- one three-bedroom house built to the wheelchair user standard
- one four-bedroom house
- two parking spaces for each three-bedroom house, three for the four-bedroom house, and three visitor spaces
No affordable housing is offered. The statement says 10 homes falls below the threshold in the Local Plan’s affordable housing policy, and that the council’s pre-application advice confirmed this. It expects a Section 106 payment towards Harlow’s Sustainable Transport Corridor and an employment and skills plan.
It also says 28 trees and two groups of trees would be removed, mostly lower-quality specimens, with new planting to replace them. The homes would not be started until the school has fully moved out. (Planning statement, Phase 2 Planning, August 2026)
Why the 42-home plan was refused
The first application, HW/FUL/23/00405, was submitted in October 2023 for 42 homes across about 2.5 hectares. That included the playing fields and the paddock. About 1.8 hectares of it is a Green Finger, one of the protected green strips that run through Harlow’s design.
The council’s officer report found that about 32 of the 42 homes would have been built on Green Finger land. The decision notice gave five reasons for refusal:
- It would cause “unacceptable encroachment and visual intrusion inside a Green Finger, which are fundamental to the character of Harlow.”
- The layout was dense and poorly designed, with parking badly placed and gardens overlooked.
- It would “urbanise the last part of the setting of Harlowbury Manor”, harming nearby heritage assets.
- It did not provide enough parking for a site that far from bus and rail routes.
- It made no infrastructure contributions.
The officer report also recorded that the scheme offered no affordable housing, on viability grounds. An independent review agreed it could not afford any. (Decision notice, officer report)
The dates on that decision do not line up neatly. The officer report is dated 9 May 2024. The council’s register records the refusal as issued on 19 November 2025, and the applicant’s own statement also says November 2025.
The council’s report was blunt about the school move. It said the relocation “is not to meet Harlow’s identified housing need but is an operational and management decision”. It said the local need for school places could be met without enlarging the school.
The new plan follows the council’s advice. The applicant says officers told it to come back with a smaller site that left out the Green Finger land.
| 2023 plan (refused) | 2026 plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Homes | 42 | 10 |
| Site area | about 2.5 hectares | about 0.71 hectares |
| Green Finger land used | about 1.8 hectares | none, per the applicant |
| Affordable homes | none, on viability | none, below the threshold |
Where the school is going
Harlowbury Primary is a one-form-entry school. It opened in 1978, according to its own website. It is due to move to a new two-form-entry school for 420 pupils inside Gilden Park, the 1,200-home development north of Gilden Way. That is about 750 metres away, the applicant says.
The builder, Morgan Sindall, put the value of the new school at £12.8 million in February. It said the building would include 56 early years places and open in autumn 2026. (Morgan Sindall Construction, 5 February 2026)
We could not confirm today that the school has moved. Its website still gives its address as Watlington Road and says nothing about the new building.
What it means for you
If you live near Watlington Road, Feryngs Close or The Oxleys, this is the moment to have a say. The council sent neighbour letters on 17 September and put up a site notice the same day.
- Comment by 8 October on the application page, quoting HW/FUL/26/00357.
- The council’s internal target for a decision is 29 October. The legal deadline is 3 December.
- Comments that carry weight deal with planning matters: design, parking, trees, traffic on Watlington Road, and the effect on the Old Harlow Conservation Area, whose boundary runs along the school’s access road.
Parents with children at Harlowbury should check with the school for moving dates. The homes cannot be built until the old site is empty.
For other applications in the town, see our Harlow planning applications page.
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