A plan to build a terrace of four houses on waste ground in a Herefordshire town has been refused permission.

GRW Property applied in March to have the scheme, by the High Street car park, Crabtree Lane in Kington, approved.

A proposal for the site was approved in 2010 but never built. GRW’s scheme was similar but would have rotated the four round 90 degrees to be oriented east-to-west.

Each with two bedrooms, the four were to have a “traditional profile” and gabled roofs of natural slate accommodating solar panels, with timbered cladding to the upper floor.

Each was to have two parking spaces and its own garden.

The terrace was to sit in the grounds of the grade II listed Harp Yard former Wesleyan chapel, with sections of its partially collapsed boundary wall being rebuilt.

Kington Town Council objected to the plan on the grounds that the terrace would “effectively isolate” the chapel, “making any access for maintenance and/or development impossible”.

Councillors added they would support delisting the chapel “in order to facilitate its development” – which they would want to see happen first.

This issue was enough to put paid to the scheme.

Planning officer Tracey Meachen pointed out that the previous plan for the had been in tandem with redevelopment of the chapel itself.

Otherwise, “the redevelopment of the chapel would be severely hindered” and it would be left “landlocked”, she concluded.

With no “mitigating public benefits” to the “significant harm” it would cause, the scheme was refused full planning permission.