Councillors backed the new King Alfred 8 to 1: a 25m eight-lane pool and 150 gym stations, but no ballroom and a third less space. It can still be called in.
Brighton & Hove’s planning committee voted 8 to 1 on 29 July to approve the £65 million replacement for the King Alfred Leisure Centre, a three-storey building on the Hove seafront with a 25 metre eight-lane pool, a 150-station gym and an undercroft car park. The permission is not yet issued: the council has had to refer the scheme to the Secretary of State, and only when that window closes can the decision notice be signed (Brighton & Hove City Council, 29 July 2026).
The vote followed 606 objections and 49 letters of support, plus a petition signed by 1,917 people, according to the officer’s report to committee (report on BH2026/00490). That is one of the heaviest postbags a Brighton & Hove application has drawn in years, and it is worth being clear about what the new building does and does not contain, because the objections were mostly about the second half of that sentence.
What was approved
Application BH2026/00490 covers only the western part of the 1.7 hectare King Alfred and Royal Naval Reserve site: the former underground bowling alley, the public car park, and the lawn west of Hove Street South. The council is both applicant and planning authority.
The new centre would be roughly 12,000 square metres measured externally, 10,850 square metres internally, over three floors: a 5,630 sqm basement for parking and plant, 4,086 sqm at ground level and 2,288 sqm on the first floor. Inside it, per the officer’s report:
- a 25 metre, eight-lane main pool with a moveable floor
- a 253 sqm learner pool, also with a moveable floor
- a 75 sqm splash pad for water play
- a 680 sqm gym with 150 stations
- a 932 sqm sports hall, two multi-purpose studios and a spinning studio
- children’s soft play, a multi-purpose community room, a café and a sunken gallery
- 194 spectator seats, a Changing Places toilet and step-free access throughout
The undercroft car park keeps 122 spaces, the same number as the surface car park it replaces, including 8 disabled bays and 4 parent and child bays, reached by a public lift from Hove Street South. 90 cycle parking spaces are proposed, which the officer noted exceeds the council’s own standard.
What grows, and what goes
The most useful thing in the committee papers is a straight comparison of the existing complex with the proposed one. It shows a building that is roughly a third smaller overall but with far more gym and changing space, and markedly less of the things families use.
Getting bigger: the gym goes from 250 sqm and 31 stations to 680 sqm and 150 stations, wet changing from 210 to 410 sqm, and the teaching pool from 95 to 253 sqm. The main pool gains two lanes.
Getting smaller or disappearing: the 385 sqm ballroom is not replaced. Two sports halls totalling 1,250 sqm become one of 932 sqm. Leisure water play falls from 180 sqm to a 75 sqm splash pad. The multi-purpose room halves from 110 to 58 sqm. Spectator seating drops from 240 seats to 194. The boxing facilities, 295 sqm, are to be relocated, and the FitLab gym will relocate too.
Total internal floorspace falls from 15,865 sqm to 10,850 sqm, and that proposed figure includes the car park.
That table is the argument in miniature. Objectors, among them the Brighton Society, Hove Civic Society, the Regency Society, Save Britain’s Heritage, Dolphins Disabled Swimming Club and the Keep and Retrofit the King Alfred campaign, told the council the scheme is “a downgrade not an enhancement” and too small for a growing coastal city. Supporters argued the current building has reached the end of its life and that a modern, accessible centre is worth the trade.
Why the Secretary of State has to look at it
This is the detail most coverage has skipped, and it is oddly specific: the whole £65 million scheme was referred upwards because of a temporary car park on a lawn.
Under the Town and Country Planning (Consultation) (England) Direction 2024, a council must consult the Secretary of State before granting permission where a development is edge-of-centre or out-of-centre, creates 5,000 square metres or more of floorspace, and conflicts with the development plan. The King Alfred meets the first two: a leisure centre is a main town centre use, the building is 12,000 sqm externally, and the site sits about 350 metres from the Church Road primary shopping area boundary, just outside the 300 metre threshold.
The conflict is the third test. To keep public parking available during construction, the scheme puts a temporary car park on the Western Lawns for two years, and the Western Lawns are designated Open Space under City Plan policy CP16. The officer’s report is blunt that this “conflicts with Policy CP16 of the Development Plan (albeit only for a temporary period)”, which triggers the referral.
The committee’s resolution was therefore “minded to grant”, not a grant. The Secretary of State has 21 days to decide whether to issue a direction under section 77 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and call the application in for their own determination. The council announced that clock on 29 July, which places the decision in the second half of August. The council’s online planning register could not be reached while this was written, so we have not been able to confirm whether a decision notice has yet been issued; if the application is called in, the scheme goes to a public inquiry instead.
Why not just refurbish it
The single most common objection was that the existing building should be repaired rather than demolished. The council’s answer, set out in the officer’s report, is a costed one: refurbishment was assessed at £13.98 million and would extend the building’s life by only about ten years, while leaving the constraints of the original design and falling short of current Sport England guidance. It was “not deemed good value for money”.
Who pays for it
Cabinet approved an indicative capital budget of up to £65 million on 25 September 2025, to be funded from a combination of capital receipts, government grants and council borrowing (King Alfred Leisure Centre Regeneration Project, Cabinet report). The capital receipt is the important one: it comes from selling the rest of the King Alfred site for housing, which the same report describes as “a key element of the funding strategy”. Officers were also authorised to negotiate grant funding with Homes England.
That is the root of the loudest procedural objection. The petition of 1,917 signatures, from the “One Site, One Plan” campaign, argues the leisure centre and the housing that pays for it should have been assessed together as a single masterplan so the combined effects could be judged at once, rather than the pool now and the flats later.
What happens next, and when
- Now: the Secretary of State’s 21-day call-in window, announced on 29 July.
- Later in 2027: construction is expected to start once pre-construction stages complete, with Alliance Leisure appointed through the UK Leisure Framework, Willmott Dixon building and GT3 Architects designing.
- 2028: expected opening.
- Throughout: the council says the existing King Alfred stays open during construction, and the temporary car park on the Western Lawns covers the two-year build.
Conditions attached to the permission include a BREEAM Excellent rating for the finished building, a minimum £65,000 for public art, an archaeological watching brief, and the relocation of the locally listed seafront shelter to the lower promenade. Construction hours are limited to 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 1pm on Saturdays, with no work on Sundays or bank holidays.
What it means for you
If you swim, train or take children to the King Alfred: nothing changes yet, and the council’s position is that the current centre keeps running until the new one is ready. When it does change, the practical differences to plan around are two more lanes in the main pool, a much larger gym, and considerably less leisure water: the lagoon-style play area becomes a 75 sqm splash pad.
If you drive there: the surface car park west of the building is the site. During the build, parking moves to the temporary car park on the Western Lawns, and afterwards to the 122-space undercroft entered from Hove Street South. The space count does not change. Our guide to parking in Brighton covers the rest of the city’s car parks and tariffs.
If you live nearby: the construction hours above are enforceable conditions, and a noise management plan and construction environmental management plan have to be agreed before work starts. The southern end of Hove Street South and Kings Esplanade are to be stopped up as part of the highway works.
If you want to follow the application: it is BH2026/00490 on the council’s planning register, and the full committee papers sit on the council’s democracy site. Note that the council has announced the planning and licensing registers will be unavailable from 3pm on Sunday 16 August until the end of Tuesday 18 August for essential maintenance, so the committee papers are the more reliable route this week. We track how the city decides applications on our Brighton planning applications page, and the wider policy backdrop, including the new City Plan, on our Brighton planning news page.
Have your say