Aire Regeneration Partnership, the second millennium village competition winner, grafts Yorkshire traditions in vernacular and planning onto 21st-century technology.
Detractors have called it Yorkshire’s answer to Barcelona, in a sideswipe at arch-urbanist Lord Rogers who played a key role in its selection. In reality, Aire Regeneration Partnership’s strategy for the second millennium community at Allerton Bywater, a 57-acre former colliery site, near Leeds in West Yorkshire, draws its inspiration from homes a lot closer to home. For its density it takes its lead from Settle, Sedbergh and Haworth, for its public spaces it draws on analysis of local towns such as Yarm, Ilkley and Ripley, and for its rhythm it relies on Knaresborough, Pateley Bridge and Great Ayton.

The winning scheme is the work of a partnership between Aire Design, a group founded by Professor Douglas Clelland, Rowse professor of architecture and urban design at Liverpool John Moores University, developers Miller Ventures and Gleeson Homes and consultant Property Solutions. Their proposal promotes the principles at the heart of Lord Rogers and the Urban Task Force. Density for the 642 homes includes pockets at up to 60 homes per hectare; there is 30 000 m2 of community and commercial space, emphasising sustainability, both environmentally and commercially, by providing employment opportunity close to home as well as essential village facilities like a pub.

Regions and regeneration minister Richard Caborn said that Aire Regeneration Partnership’s scheme “presents innovative ideas which will take housebuilding into the twenty first century, combining the principles of design excellence, social well-being and environmental responsibility.” Its architecture is perhaps a little lower-key than one might have expected of a Rogers-influenced choice - a rival shortlisted consortium included the internationally-renowned deconstructivist architect Daniel Libeskind. But its total approach may have been favoured for its deliverability.

With the first millennium village in Greenwich yet to get on site and demonstrate its ability to live up to the promised blueprint for house design and construction that it set out in February last year, the competition judges this time have been looking for a scheme that won’t later unravel. Aire Regeneration Partnership has promised to deliver its scheme over an anticipated five-year programme through a non-adversarial partnership approach.

Allerton Bywater presents a very different scenario for development to the Greenwich millennium village. Brownfield it may be again, but this time there is already a village within the site, with some 200 homes - typically traditional red-brick terraced miners’ cottages, a church, schools, an industrial estate and even a fish and chip shop. But when the adjoining colliery closed in the early 1990s after more than a century of operation, 850 jobs went with it and the village lost its prime source of employment. Aire Regeneration Partnership’s plans should replace around half of those lost jobs.

With the new community promising to more than quadruple Allerton Bywater’s population, integration is a key challenge for the development team. The past has to be respected at the same time as a more commercial and dynamic future is generated. Development will begin on the edge of the existing village.

The dense terraces of the colliery housing will be echoed in the layout and the design of the millennium community’s new homes. But while the focus of the original village was polluting coal, the new community will have environmental sustainability literally at its heart.

Masterplanning for environmental quality and diversity

Aire Design’s masterplan has an ecological street running from east to west through the community. This pedestrian-friendly tree-lined boulevard will have along its centre a series of shared community greenhouses, where residents can nurture the plants that they will be able to buy from the village’s proposed new garden centre. North to south a waterway leading to the River Aire creates a water garden, overlooked by public space and a nursing home. At the intersection of these two key green corridors is Bywater Square, the new community’s centre, where the highest density of activities will be encouraged. At the edges of the square will be mixed use buildings containing apartments. Between them will be a covered market, convenience store, the garden centre and associated businesses and, at the site of the former mine head, the Nautilus Centre, a national diving academy and visitors’ centre with a nursery school alongside. The partnership hopes that the diving centre and the community greenhouses will be able to use methane gases from the mines as an energy source. Another natural resource that will go to good use is rainfall, as surface rainwater will be fed into a reservoir and used to water allotments. Homes themselves will be fitted with grey water recycling kit, and other environmental innovations could feature in a small group of 19 eco-homes to be built in the south of the village. Small “pocket parks” and play areas, and cycle routes and pathways complete the greening of the new community. But not all of Allerton Bywater’s new amenities are focussed around the new square. In the spirit of integration, the village green that joins the two communities is being surrounded by a mix of uses. An existing primary school will be extended to accommodate the children of new homebuyers, and it will be joined by a foyer project with a ground floor dedicated to youth, a sports centre, doctor’s surgery, post office and open tenure new homes. In fact, whether it is design of homes, layout or tenure, the keynote of the masterplan is diversity.

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