THE public got a brief glimpse of how the new Winchester Sports and Leisure Park could look.

Councillors Lisa Griffiths, portfolio holder for health and wellbeing, and Guy Ashton, portfolio holder for finance, have outlined how the leisure centre and its surrounding facilities would interact with the city through a network of cycle routes and paths.

They also presented design framework for the area, which includes the landmark depot site, but some councillors were left asking for more.

Opposition councillors Brian Laming, Malcolm Prince (Liberal Democrats) and Kim Gottlieb (Conservative) criticised the lack of information about the depot, with Cllr Laming saying: “The depot site should have been included in the leisure centre.

“It’s about making sure the leisure centre creates a regeneration of that area.

“Infrastructure doesn’t take into account the depot site.

“It’s really quite mad.”

Former Labour parliamentary candidate Patrick Davies, who was at the meeting, added: “As someone who has repeatedly asked the council why it has excluded the depot site from this exercise, I’m annoyed it isn’t in the overall site strategy.”

One of the ideas for the site heard through resident feedback was to create a convenience store.

Cllr Laming said: “I think a convenience store would help residents.

“There is a company that is interested in buying a bit of the site, also.”

Defending the handling of the scheme, Cllr Ashton said principals for the depot had been set out in the design framework.

They included uses that would be not generate much traffic and would have a low parking requirement.

The convenience store was being taken on board by the council.

Cllr Ashton added that there had been no deals yet for the depot site and that the council had received more than 1,000 responses across 14 consultation events.

The scheme will now go before the city council’s overview and scrutiny committee in mid May, before a planning application is submitted in May/June.

The design framework will then go before cabinet for approval on June 6.