CONTRACTORS started work this week on building a KFC drive-thru restaurant for Wellington.

It is sited on half-an-acre of land between the Skylark public house and Travelodge hotel and a Costa Coffee drive-through store at Westpark 26 business park, Chelston.

The plot is the last with a frontage on to Wellington Relief Road.

The new KFC is expected to take about nine months until it is ready to open for business.

Groundworks were being carried out by award-winning Devon Contractors, which is headquartered in Clyst St Mary, near Exeter.

The KFC franchise will present competition for Miss Millie's Fried Chicken, which opened a concession in the nearby Shell petrol station in May.

Miss Millie's is named after the granddaughter of Colonel Sanders, the iconic founder and face of KFC, and was created in 1998 by Harry Latham, a former KFC UK director and friend of the colonel's granddaughter Mildred.

The single-storey Chelston KFC restaurant, at 2,680 sq ft, will be slightly more than half the size of the nearby McDonalds drive-through restaurant.

Planning permission for the drive-thru restaurant was given in July, with the planners imposing several conditions, one of which restricts the opening times to between 7 am and 11 pm.

Planning agent Mike Taylor, of Bristol-based Angus Meek Architects, said the KFC branch would feature glazing, planked cladding, and ‘vibrant vinyl applied graphics’, with dark grey window and door frames.

There will be 32 parking spaces for cars, 12 of which will be electric vehicle charging spaces, and 10 spaces for bicycle parking.

A condition of the planning approval was that all the electric vehicle charging bays had to be built before the restaurant can open.

KFC is currently looking for more than 500 new sites across the UK and Ireland and will pay up to £20,000 for introductions.

It celebrated its 65th anniversary last year, has more than 26,000 restaurants in 145 countries around the world with 820,000 employees.