The plans are in. Aldi wants to flatten Pinopolis on Sandy Road and put a supermarket in its place.
The detailed application has gone to Carmarthenshire Council three months after the consultation that drew warnings about traffic from the ward’s two county councillors.
Traffic is where the scheme has changed most. Cars and delivery lorries would no longer turn in off Sandy Road at all.
Council highway officers objected to that access at the pre-application stage in February, on road safety grounds, and told Aldi to look at the roundabout to the east instead. The submitted design does exactly that.
The pedestrian entrance from Sandy Road stays, and would be widened.
Aldi’s architects say moving the vehicle access also keeps traffic away from the bus stops and the entrance to Coleg Sir Gâr’s Graig campus just north of the site.
Cllrs Martyn Palfreman and Edward Skinner said in May that any permission had to be conditional on further improvements to the road. The application does not commit to anything beyond the site itself.
What Aldi wants to build
The store would be single storey, with about 1,792 square metres of floor space inside, on a site of just over two and a half acres.
There would be 133 parking spaces, including six accessible bays, nine parent and child spaces and five for staff. Eight would have electric charging points, with cabling laid for another 26, and there would be room for 14 bicycles.
An earlier layout put a drive-thru in the eastern corner alongside the store. It went when the flood mapping was added to the drawings.
The plans also show a six-metre illuminated Aldi sign on twin poles at the entrance, a new bus stop and shelter on Sandy Road, and close-boarded fencing along the southern boundary, where the site backs onto the Millennium Coastal Park.
A narrow site, a water main and a flood zone
The western end of the site sits in flood zone 3, the highest risk category, which is why the store has been pushed away from the houses on that side.
The design statement also describes a major water main easement that could not be moved and a sewer easement to the north. The store has ended up squeezed between the two, with the service yard behind it rather than beside it, to keep the building narrow enough to fit.
Aldi’s own document is blunt about how little room there is to negotiate on the plan. The layout, it says, “cannot be amended without impacting the viability of the scheme”.
Dark grey cladding, red brick and a blank wall the council has already queried
The store would be dark grey cladding above a grey brick plinth, with red brickwork picked to echo the housing nearby, a mono-pitched roof and full height glazing at the car park end.
Carmarthenshire’s planners flagged at the pre-application stage that they would have concerns about the amount of blank cladding on the northern elevation, the side facing the A484.
Existing trees and hedgerows along the southern boundary, next to the watercourse, would be kept, with new planting elsewhere and a drainage basin to hold back surface water.
The roof would carry solar panels, and the building would run on air source heat pumps with no gas connection at all.
What happens to Pinopolis
Aldi says the store would create up to 40 jobs, with store assistants starting at £13.50 an hour.
The building is older than either use. It opened in 1979 as Day’s Ford, the car dealership that closed in 2020.
Pinopolis took the site on, opening in April 2023 with bowling, darts, soft play and a diner. Its David Edwards said in May that Sandy Road was “no longer economically or operationally viable” and the business was looking for a new home.
Sandy Road has been one of Llanelli‘s most stubborn congestion spots for years, and the traffic lights at the Maes-y-Coed junction went live only last September.
The council has not set a date to decide the application.
Discover more from Swansea Bay News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
