13740/1RESIDENTS of Duck's Meadow, Marlborough, have been celebrating after winning the support of the town council in their battle to move the site of a proposed new school away from their homes.

They are terrified that the futuristic replacement building that will unite St John's School on a single site will blight their lives with noise, loss of privacy, loss of light during the day but light pollution at night, especially during the winter.

They question the need for the school to be crammed into one corner of the huge Cherry Orchard site, most of which will be left as playing fields, while the site of the present school will be left undeveloped after the 1960s buildings have been demolished.

They have gone so far as to retain the services of Wroughton-based firm of planning consultants RPS, which has drawn up a list of objections to the school governors' proposals.

In his report on behalf of RPS, associate planner Guy Bailey wrote: "This proposal intends to amalgamate the disparate number of existing school buildings into one. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the buildings are proposed to increase in size.

"However, the proposal has resulted in one large 'block' encompassing all the school facilities, up to four storeys in height, and therefore dominating the area and directly affecting the amenity of a number of residential properties."

The residents forwarded a copy of the report to town councillors who were due to be considering their response to the details of the scheme at their planning committee meeting on Monday night.

St John's already has outline planning permission to build the new school at Cherry Orchard, and intends to finance it by selling its lower school site in Chopping Knife Lane for housing. The Duck's Meadow residents found they had almost unanimous support from town councillors.

Coun Marian Hannaford said: "I am very worried about this development. The original plans showed the school as being very much further back on the site, but the new plans have it crammed into one corner. It is very provocative to residents and we owe them a duty of care."

Coun Nick Fogg said that the new school would not benefit generations of children as had been claimed.

He said: "At a meeting with the architects at the end of May, councillors were told the materials being used would be redundant in 30 to 40 years. This is utterly ridiculous. If the school is spending the only resource it has (the Chopping Knife Lane site), then it should be benefiting generations to come."

One of the leaders of the campaign, Debbie Findlay, who runs Wedding Belles in Kingsbury Street, said: "So far RPS has done us proud, but it is not cheap to employ consultants and we are financing it ourselves.

"We do not object to the building of a new single-site school but there are too many amenity issues which affect the whole of Marlborough for the application to proceed on its current basis."

Town councillors had been given until today to formulate their observations, but they have asked for longer to work out all their objections to the scheme, giving time for the subject to be brought up at a special full town council meeting on August 16 at 7pm.

Representatives of the school and the architects are to be invited to put their case to the residents and to town councillors.