Work has been completed on the first phase of a project to alleviate parking problems in a riverside town.

Woodbridge has been desperate to find more land for extra off-street parking due to its growing popularity as a shopping and tourist hotspot.

The first phase of an £850,000 project to create much-needed extra parking has now been completed on time.

Work at The Avenue car park started in November to provide an extra 13 spaces and new bike racks. The car park has also been surfaced, relined and swept to improve the appearance.

While there has been some loss of vegetation, larger trees on the site are being retained and a substantial new planting scheme has been planned to replace anything taken out.

In addition to the landscaping, work will also be carried out to update the bollards at a later date, to tie in with the rest of the project.

In the second phase of the project, improvements will be made to the Station Road car park in Woodbridge to create an extra 50 parking spaces and add speed humps to slow down vehicles in the car parks, an electrical car charger for two cars and new bike racks.

The walkway between The Avenue car park and Station Road car park will remain closed during the work, so there will be no access to the river or Kingston Park via this route until the work is finished.

Carol Poulter, Suffolk Coastal’s cabinet member for the green environment said: “Woodbridge is becoming increasingly popular with visitors and the town centre is thriving, so we had repeated calls to provide extra parking for shoppers and visitors alike.

“I’d like to thank the public for their cooperation during the works. We hope that the changes will help make parking in the town easier for everyone.”

The work was purposely programmed to avoid the busiest times of the year for people visiting the riverside area and be less disruptive to businesses.

It has been funded thanks to money from the business rates which the government allowed Suffolk to retain as part of a pilot project.

The scheme provided £10.4million for projects across the county – with £3.5m of that going to work in east Suffolk. Whitehall has now removed Suffolk from the programme.