A large office block near Crowthorne will be converted into more than 100 flats.

Part of the Pinewood Campus in will undergo a change in use after serving as the offices for pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson.

Plans submitted to Wokingham Borough Council by agents for the owners, Legal and General Assurance (Pensions Management) Ltd, show designs for a total of 109 apartments.

No building work would be done to the outside of the building in the process of converting the block to flats.

These would be a mixture of studios, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments.

At least a hundred car spaces will be provided, with one car per resident and a potential 22 visitor spaces.

There are already cycle storage spaces for office workers, of which there will be one per resident.

It is located to the southeast of Wokingham, close to Nine Mile Ride and Pinewood Leisure centre.

But the site has limited public transport access, with the nearest bus stop located 320m east of the site.

The closest railway station would be Crowthorne, while Wokingham and Bracknell would both be a 5-6km drive away.

It would fall into the area described by the council as "Wokingham Without", which covers land between Bracknell and Wokingham which covers large parts of Crowthorne.

A ward member for Wokingham Without, where the site is located, raised objections to the plans.

Councillor Seona Turtle said that she thought the development ‘should be considered unacceptable’ because it is ‘clearly in the countryside’.

Councillor Turtle referenced the South Wokingham SDL plan – a major 2,500 home development for the part of the borough – to argue that buildings like pinewood campus should be protected.

The ward member requested that any other building on the site would be protected from future change of use to housing.

Wokingham Without Parish Council did not raise a formal objection, but rather expressed some ‘reservations’ with the plans.

The lower authority argued that the site is in a designated countryside location and that the area had already experienced an increase in housing.

It also argued that there is a lack of supporting infrastructure in the area to cope with growing populations – things like shops, health services and schools.

Other concerns were raised over the increase in traffic that it would cause, with hundreds of new cars on the roads surrounding Nine Mile Ride.

Despite this, Wokingham Borough Council granted ‘prior approval’ to the plans on October 10 for the change of use of the building.

More details will be supplied by the applicant over designs and time scale.