Lake District planners have cracked down on a garden centre that has repeatedly flouted conditions restricting its retail activities.

Grasmere Garden Centre is the biggest commercial operation in the village and national park authority planners fear the unauthorised activities are threatening the viability of other local shops.

The centre was granted planning permission in 1988 and the authority says it has been breaking the conditions prescribing the scale of its sales operation and the range of goods it could offer on and off ever since.

Now the authority has thrown out an application to expand the general sales area and range of goods on sale in other areas and has decided to clamp down on the centre.

Senior enforcement planner David McGowan told the development control committee that an enforcement notice was first issued in 1989 when the centre was found to be selling a wide variety of goods, including clothes, gifts, china and glassware, not allowed by the planning conditions.

The centre appealed and lost but, despite this, members heard the unauthorised sales continued to varying degrees.

In an attempt to control the activities, Mr McGowan said the original permission was amended in 1998 to detail exactly what could be sold in different parts of the centre. While most of the centre was restricted to plants or specified garden-related goods, the central area was allowed to continue selling general goods. The aim was to secure the commercial viability of the centre while preventing it from harming other traders, he said.

However, the unauthorised activities still persisted and a series of escalating enforcement measures had since been taken culminating in a formal caution issued by the authority's solicitor in November 2003.

In response to the caution, the company applied for the planning conditions to be relaxed to allow a bigger area for unrestricted sales and a broader range of specified items.

The committee deferred the application last month so members could visit the site. They were joined on site by representatives from both the district and parish councils who objected strongly to the way the garden centre had been operating and expressed concern at the impact on other traders in the village.

Recommending that the application be refused, Mr McGowan said: "A significant increase in general retail sales within a complex of this size would be wholly out of scale and character and would detract from the character of the village."

The committee agreed that the application should be refused and authorised further enforcement action to bring the centre into line.