Top bloke and blog contributor Andy Dennis has spotted an interesting planning application for the old Royal Mail sorting office and yard on the corner of Church Road and High Street in Brownhills – application number 11/0969/OL. After closure of the sorting facility, sited in the yard behind the old post office, the site lay empty for a while, before becoming the world’s most cluttered secondhand bookshop for a couple of years. I think it’s in use as an office for a driving school of some kind at the moment. It seems that a local company called Leisure Automatics Limited want to build a new bar/restaurant there. I don’t know anything about them, frankly, as their website is junk. Their listed address is 99, High Street, Brownhills. Hmm.

There’s a really good 3D projection available in the application submitted to Walsall Council, one of the best such impressions I’ve seen for a while. If only all such drawings were as clear and easy to follow as this.

Excerpt from the 'Views and Impressions' document submitted as part of the planning application. To see the full document, click the image. Taken from Walsall Council's Planning Interactive.

It’s an interesting application, and I have no objection to it personally – that looks like an awful lot of red brick wall, however, and I think it might be a bit imposing if not carefully executed. Whether there’s a market for it or not, it anyone’s guess, but the applicants must be fairly confident, so I wish them well. We could do with some new life in the town. Just get your website sorted folks, that looks really, really Mickey Mouse.

As of posting this, no decision has been made. There are links to some of the more interesting documents below.