New neighbourhoods in old places: designing and delivering innovative and sustainable housing development

On 1 November we held a forum event to explore ideas relating to the development of new neighbourhoods in old places, with a particular focus on community and place. Thank you to our six speakers for sharing their thoughts and expertise through case studies and evaluation of projects up and down the country: 

Cany Ash made the case for profitable neighbourhoods, which are resilient, equitable, desirable and walkable. This idea takes a different approach to thinking about density, with, for example, maisonettes being stacked on top of each other, each toggled to ensure privacy, and each with their own front door and outdoor space. These ideas could be especially welcome in the smaller sites and scrappy corners of our towns and villages that will never be of interest to the big developers. These are places where SMEs, micro-organisations and community groups might shine.

Community engagement for both rural and urban projects – from Thame Community Land Trust and the village of Milton Heights to Blackbird Leys in Oxford – was the focus of Sammy-Jo Hagan’s presentation. The idea of intangible heritage was one that was picked up at several points during the day.

Nick Bigelow guided us through a landscape-based approach to development, taking the meaning of ‘land’ (home territory/place to belong) and ‘scape’ (to create) as the starting point to explore projects in a variety of locations (including the Strand Aldwych, which has just won the Academy of Urbanism’s Great Street award for 2024). This focus on the spaces between buildings through landscape design raises questions about human influence over the natural environment, nature and biodiversity. It also raises the possibility of using landscape as a means of stitching together the old and the new.

Streets are one of the many elements of historic places that could and should inform new development, and the importance of streets, scale and enclosure was explored in several of the talks. Two additional strands of conversation were a community sense of ownership and meanwhile uses.

Robin Nicholson made a compelling argument for the use of quality panels to review developments in the years after completion. The Cambridgeshire Quality Panel has reviewed 6 schemes (~45,000 homes) using the CambridgeQuality Charter’s 4 criteria: community, connectivity, character and climate. There are issues with highways, hard landscaping and build quality. But all of the schemes have a higher density than many new developments in the UK, two are better than average, and one has been more successful from a social and community perspective than anticipated. These findings have been distilled into the following key conditions for success: ‘have a committed master developer who stays with the scheme and a full design team – including landscape architect – from the beginning; understand your impact on the climate and biodiversity emergency; test plot layouts; design streets as places for people, bicycles and cars, and allow for change’. The full report is available online.

Nansleadon, on the outskirts of Newquay, was the main subject of Fredrik Carlsson’s talk, which introduced the five key principles of this development: inclusivity; local identity; low carbon buildings and lifestyles; dwellings as a mirror of self; and secure delivery (which includes sustainability, energy, food, water and transport strategies, amongst other things). Design codes, creating a legacy, local jobs and materials all form part of delivery of this vision of a traditional form of modern architecture.

Last but not least, Harrison Symonds rounded off the day with an exploration of heritage and the distillation of place, or in the words of Colin Rowe: ‘How does the new invade the old and the old invade the new?’ What followed was a case study-packed tour that included some of the key elements from this event:

•Informal social spaces, containment and enclosure of space (e.g., Wilkinsons Brook, Tyrrelstown; Steepleton, Tetbury; see also the Phoenix, Lewes and Nansleadon).
•A consideration of street frontages, hierarchy, and parking (White Hart Street, Mansfield; see also the Phoenix and Nansleadon).
•Avoiding overlooking whilst challenging standard window-to-window distance requirements (Abode, Great Kneighton; see also the Malings, Ouseburn and Nansleadon).
•Building to a higher density to create more sustainable neighbourhoods that might also leave more land for green space. (Benfield Valley, Hove).

Although the focus of the case studies from all of our speakers was on new places and new housing, there were many useful ideas about fitting new into old. Primarily through inspiration – be it use of materials and colours (Nansleadon and the Phoenix), a modern take on traditional forms, such as the informal clusters of buildings around farms known as clachans (Wilkinsons Brook), or through a celebration of the history and existing character of a place (White Hart Street and Tibby’s Triangle, Southwold).

Top image: Profitable Neighbourhoods © Ash Sakula

Bottom images, clockwise from top left: Legacy development © ADAM Architecture; the importance of place © Proctor & Matthews; raising design quality aspiration © Cambridgeshire Quality Panel; working with the community in Blackbird Leys © Transition by Design.

 

 

Back to News