Weymouth's new beach office and loo complex has been given planning approval with work on the £400,000 scheme expected to start this autumn and the building opened by next Easter.

But it comes with a health warning – with toilet doors opening outwards onto the seafront there is a risk, as one expert put it, of passers by “getting smacked in the face.”

The Dorset Council area planning committee was reluctant to hold up the scheme to make that change, or to put more solar panels on the roof, as many had suggested. It was also not persuaded to delay the approval so that Weymouth Town Council's planning committee, which meets next week on June 2, could make its comments.

The town council is expected to run the additional toilets, beach office and kiosk space when the revamped building opens.

The project involves refurbishing and extending the existing Esplanade beach office with a changing room and access to underground toilets and other rooms, including two commercial sales area, one designed to be a cafe with outdoor seating.

The upper floor will have a new beach control office with an outdoor seating terrace to the north side of the building. The extended beach office, on stilts, will project over the Esplanade, further than the existing structure does.

The plans also show beach showers outside the building as well as a single storey extension to include a beach kiosk. Overall the building will add 22 unisex toilets, including accessible toilets, a parent room and family room.

Weymouth Civic Society says its pleased to see the increase in facilities but has worries about the look of a row of toilet doors facing the beach.

Several people commented that the building should have more solar panels but Thursday's committee was told that the design has enough for the building itself to be self-sufficient from solar panels.

Weymouth councillor Kate Wheller said she was disappointed that the original drawings had been changed so that the toilet doors now opened directly onto the Esplanade, rather than internally - but she said that last thing she was going to do was delay the scheme.

“I don't want to hold this up, but I am a bit concerned,” she said.

Highways officer Ian Madgwick said although the application was not for him to comment on and there was no highway objection, he said he personally would be concerned about doors opening, unexpectedly, onto a busy seafront: “It seems to me that if you have got a busy thoroughfare the last thing you want is to be smacked in the face by an opening toilet door. It needs to be indicated in some ways that the doors could open,” he said, adding that, generally fire doors were the only doors which were allowed to open directly outwards onto a street.

Another Weymouth councillor Peter Barrow was told in response to a question that there was nothing to stop the town council, or anyone else, using one of the commercial spaces as a tourist office, replacing the tourist office which had previously been on the site.