Current signs on a shop inside the Aberystwyth conservation area are “inappropriate”, planners have said, as a scheme for a different design was rejected.

Owners of the It’s a Bargain store on Terrace Road applied to Ceredigion County Council to install a new shop front on the building, which sits in the Aberystwyth Conservation Area.

The plan would have replaced the traditional shopfront with a with a “large single pane shopfront with a modern character.”

Aberystwyth Town Council objected to the application as well as the signs that are being used on the shopfront currently.

“The current and proposed signage is not in keeping with the locality, nor is it a sympathetic development of the site,” the town council said.

“The council would like to remind the applicants to submit a planning application for their current signage, which does not conform to the supplementary guidance on shopfront and commercial facade design in Aberystwyth.”

Ceredigion County Council planning officers said that the shop’s current signage design is “inappropriate”, and said the new design proposals would “involve the loss of the historic shopfront”.

“No justification has been provided by way of conditional survey for the loss of the shopfront and the proposed replacement is considered to materially and detrimentally alter the appearance of both the application building, the streetscape, and ultimately, the appearance and character of the Aberystwyth Town Centre Conservation Area,” planners said.

“Over time some of the historic shop fronts have been insensitively altered mainly due to modern and unsympathetic advertisements, harsh corporate colour schemes and too many signs,” a planning report said.

The Aberystwyth shop front and Commercial Façade supplementary planning guidance states that original shopfronts and other architectural features should be retained and refurbished and that “buildings should be refurbished via an ‘evidence based’ approach where possible”