MFG has lodged an appeal with the government’s Planning Inspectorate after it was refused planning permission to upgrade a Wiltshire filling station.
The project concerns the forecourt operator’s 25-year deal with outdoor advertising firm Wildstone, which has hit a snag after the pair were told by Wiltshire Council that they cannot install a digital advertising screen at an Esso forecourt in Durrington, a village six miles north of Salisbury.
MFG and Wildstone announced in March this year that they were formalising their relationship, begun in 2024, to install hundreds of digital ad screens, with 253 already having been put in place.
But while MFG says the partnership has “exceeded expectations in creating a new revenue stream”, local planners often take exception to digital advertising screens – most often due to their potential to distract drivers, or for aesthetic reasons.
Wiltshire Council has cited the latter of those reasons in its refusal notice, telling the firms that their proposed 1.23m by 2.45m screen “would appear as a visually dominant and intrusive feature within the streetscene”.
The authority’s planning officer’s states that while the proposed digital board would replace a static one, they consider that “digital advertisements possess a materially different visual presence to static advertisements due to their illumination and changing content”.
The council also argues that the proposed sign would “be highly visible” to drivers leaving a nearby conservation area, amounting to an “incongruous” feature that would “add to visual clutter” while being “unnecessarily dominant”.
Undeterred, Wildstone has lodged an appeal with the government’s Planning Inspectorate, arguing that the sign “would not appear visually dominant” compared to the petrol station itself, and that it is “not materially significant given the existing signage” at the site.
The firm also notes that the forecourt’s digital pole sign was granted planning permission back in 2010, and that a case cited by the council concerning the refusal of another Wildstone bid to digitise an existing advertising board, this one on the side of a house, “provides no meaningful comparison as that site does not comprise an established petrol station”.
