Cheltenham Zone 15 parking became permanent on 9 September after six months with no objections. Match-day controls on five roads, four streets freed.

Cheltenham Zone 15 parking is now permanent. The experimental rules that have governed streets around Pittville and All Saints for the past 18 months were confirmed by a Gloucestershire County Council variation order that came into effect on Wednesday 9 September 2026. The statutory notice was published on 17 September.

The council’s stated reason for making it permanent is short. “The six month consultation period has now ended and no objections have been received,” its updated statement of reasons says. “Therefore, it is assumed that the new Z15 restrictions are working well.”

Not one formal objection was lodged against an experiment that changed parking on dozens of streets in four wards.

What is now permanent

The order covers roads in the All Saints, Oakley, Charlton Park and Pittville wards. It makes five sets of changes permanent, all of them first introduced by an experimental traffic order on 10 March 2025:

  • Shorter hours in the north of the zone. Control there runs Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, instead of Monday to Sunday, 8am to 8pm. Streets closer to the town centre keep the longer hours.
  • Event day controls on roads north of Pittville Circus Road, tied to Cheltenham Town Football Club fixtures.
  • The zone boundary extended to take in a section of London Road between Hales Road and Haywards Road.
  • The zone boundary cut back, removing permit restrictions from several north-eastern streets.
  • Localised changes to waiting and loading restrictions on roads across the zone.

Four streets lose their permit parking area status outright under Schedule 2 of the order: Oak Manor Drive, Eldon Road, Eldon Avenue and Beechurst Avenue. Sections of Carlton Street, Sydenham Villas Road and Hewlett Road also have restrictions revoked.

The match-day rule, and the five streets it applies to

The most unusual part of the order is Schedule 3, which writes a football club into a county council parking order.

A Cheltenham Town Football Club Event is defined as any first team home league or cup fixture, or any other event at the club where the organiser expects more than 1,000 spectators and gives the county council at least 28 days’ notice.

On those days, five roads off Pittville Circus Road carry extra controls beyond the normal weekday hours:

  • Hayes Road
  • Moorcourt Drive
  • Selkirk Close
  • Selkirk Gardens
  • Westbourne Drive

The additional hours are Monday to Friday, 5pm to 8.30pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 4.30pm. Those windows are built around kick-off times rather than the working day.

Residents were more sceptical than the silence suggests

The zone was introduced in September 2023 after residents complained that commuters, shoppers and visitors were taking their spaces. It did not settle things. The council commissioned The Project Centre Limited to run an independent review, which held face-to-face sessions in July 2024 and then an informal consultation from 28 August to 27 September 2024.

The response was substantial. 5,037 properties were consulted. 649 submissions came back, of which 618 were viable, a response rate of 6.49%. Of those, 510 came from households inside the existing zone.

What they said does not obviously point towards “working well”:

  • 49.02% of respondents did not agree that the proposed concept designs would improve the existing restrictions.
  • On match days, 318 people (51.45%) in the northern part of the area said they had experienced difficulties, but only 161 households (31.6%) wanted match-day restrictions. The consultants’ own conclusion was that “there was no clear support for the introduction of event day controls”.
  • The most common free-text theme, at 15.9% of responses, was a request for restrictions to be removed. The second, at 15.4%, was that the scheme had improved parking.
Timeline of the Cheltenham Zone 15 parking scheme from its introduction in September 2023 to the permanent order of 9 September 2026, showing 649 consultation submissions in 2024 and zero formal objections in the six-month feedback window
Three years from a complained-about zone to a permanent order. Graphic by The Cheltenham Journal.
Share this chartFacebookWhatsAppX

The one clear consensus was on hours: over 35% of respondents in the northern section wanted weekday-only control, while 43.8% in the south wanted to keep 8am to 8pm. That is precisely the split the permanent order now delivers.

So the experiment did what the consultation asked on hours, imposed event-day controls the consultation had not asked for, and then drew no formal objections at all during the six-month window in which anyone could have challenged either.

What it means for you

  • If you live in the north of Zone 15, the weekday 9am to 5pm hours are now permanent. You are no longer covered at weekends or in the evenings, except on football event days if you are on one of the five named roads.
  • If you live on Oak Manor Drive, Eldon Road, Eldon Avenue or Beechurst Avenue, the permit area no longer applies to you and your permit is no longer needed for those streets. Anyone may park there, subject to any remaining waiting restrictions.
  • If you live on Hayes Road, Moorcourt Drive, Selkirk Close, Selkirk Gardens or Westbourne Drive, check the club’s fixture list before a home game. Visitor parking in those windows is now an offence rather than an irritation.
  • If you want to challenge the order, the only route left is the High Court, within six weeks of the date the order was made, on the ground that it exceeds the powers in the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. The objection stage has closed.
  • The sealed order, plans, statement of reasons and boundary maps can be inspected at the Municipal Offices on the Promenade, or at Shire Hall in Gloucester, quoting reference CB/82438.

Permits themselves are a county council matter, not a borough one. Our parking in Cheltenham page sets out the split, and Cheltenham roadworks and travel tracks every current closure and order in the borough.

Sources