A PLANNING application for around 60 riverside retirement flats in Taunton is likely to be submitted in the spring.

Churchill Retirement Living wants to build the development on the site of the existing Lidl store in Wood Street.

The supermarket was this week granted planning permission to build a new store on the site of the former Taunton Youth and Community Centre, in Castle Street.

Once that has been built and Lidl relocates, Churchill, subject to winning planning consent, will bulldoze the existing store to make way for the new flats.

Churchill’s planning director Andrew Burgess said: “We’re pleased Lidl has been granted planning permission – it means we can now move forward with our plans.”

The apartments, which are unlikely to be ready before 2017, will be part of a four-storey sheltered housing scheme, with some communal facilities.

“People will be living independently in their own apartments with a lodge manager overseeing things,” said Mr Burgess.

He added: “In assessing the potential for redevelopment of this site, we have had due regard to the character of the area, local residential amenity, the riverside walk, flooding and the adopted and emerging planning policy for Taunton town centre.

“We will be bringing forward a high quality retirement development, well located to the facilities in the town, which will meet the housing needs of older people in Taunton, who wish to ‘rightsize’ and move to accommodation better suited to their needs.”