Goodbye Brookside, Hello Ambridge

With new villages housebuilders are doing a lot more than using more buyer-friendly terminology to conjure up a nostalgic picture in the mind. They are restyling their standard housetypes to literally recreate England’s architectural heritage and, spurred on by the Government’s edicts on sustainability, imbuing estates with the qualities of real communities, by providing jobs, public transport and community facilities. It could be described as putting heart into housebuilding.

The development approach that started with Poundbury is becoming the mainstay of the estate housebuilder’s repertoire.

Wimpey Homes is currently building on six village sites, ranging from Fairford Leys in Aylesbury, which saw its first homes built nearly two years ago, to the freshly launched Moss Green Village in Stoke on Trent.

In Solihull in the West Midlands, the 850-home Dickens Heath village is taking shape under the guidance of Redrow Homes, supported by Laing, Bryant, David Wilson and Trencherwood. And this month Alfred McAlpine, Bovis and Bryant opened the concept centre to market the new 3000-home Cambourne settlement near Cambridge.

The housebuilders’ aim is the same as that of landowner the Ernest Cook Trust more than a decade ago when it invited architect John Simpson to come up with a masterplan for the community of up to 2000 homes at Fairford Leys. “They were trying to produce something that wasn’t Anywhere, UK,” says Mike Bennett, project co-ordinator with Fairford Leys consortium.

”There’s a general recognition that we have to move forward from the sea of housing estates to providing a range of styles and housing environments,” says Nicholas Scregg, managing director of Beazer subsidiary Elvetham Heath Developments, which has just won planning approval for the master plan and design brief for the former Railroad Heath site in Fleet, Hampshire.

Elvetham Heath’s design brief, which was a requirement of the village’s outline planning permission, sets out three architectural themes for housebuilders to follow on the site: rural vernacular, Arts and Crafts, and late nineteenth century formal. More than that, it sets out elements of each theme, for example, asymmetric door and window openings with dark stained frames, bay windows and sweeping roofs for the Arts and Crafts style. This level of design prescription is not intended to invoke pastiche, says Scregg. “The brief is fairly stringent, but it says we don’t want replica. We are quite happy to look at modern reinterpretation.”

The nostalgia factor is, however, a strong element in villages’ appeal to homebuyers. “The public still has a romantic view of the country cottage and the idea of village life,” says Graeme Bell, director of the Town and Country Planning Association. “People hanker after the village. You can collect tokens in the Daily Mail to win a country cottage, but not to win a loft apartment.”

There is also a planning imperative to the village. “Planners and local community groups have difficulties in delivering a significant new settlement of 30,000, but they find that they can deliver a settlement of 3,000,” says Bell, although he questions whether such new villages can match the sustainability of existing ones. “If they are a dormitory for people commuting to work they can be lonely places during a weekday. They may not be as environmentally sustainable as larger settlements or extensions of a town, but they can work if they are in the right place, have the right facilities and are not dormitories.”

Cambridge’s Cambourne has been designed as a fully integrated settlement, with both modern business park and retro-styled village high street packed with shops and smaller businesses.

“The term sustainable is in vogue, but is hard to judge - does it mean you need a police station? how many shops are enough?,” says Paul Smith, managing director of Alfred McAlpine Homes East, the developer responsible for bringing the site through the masterplan process.

The facilities at Cambourne, he says, “enhance the capability of the community to get the most from the site” and they are, like the houses, predominantly wrapped in traditional village architecture.

“The council was looking for a vision with a rural village character. We are working with them to achieve that. I see us as partnering with South Cambridgeshire District Council,” says Smith.

“We have a very strict design brief. It is never easy to work with a design brief - I’d be perturbed if it were. But the regulations stipulating the requirements for setting a design brief say that it has to be commercial, so we have a happy compromise on materials. We have found that the design brief works well with commerciality.”

Like other new villages currently under construction, Cambourne was planned before sustainability was made a concern by Government. “It pre-dates much of the legislation, but incorporates a lot of the things that are being talked about,” says Gareth Jones, deputy planning director of South Cambridgeshire District Council. “It links jobs with homes, it’s on a major transport corridor, has bus services and involves contributions to park and ride in Cambridge. But there’s nothing like water recycling. If we were doing Cambourne again today, there’d be things like that.”

Those kind of features are on the agenda for upcoming schemes, like Garden City 21, the west of Stevenage expansion now being contemplated by lead developer Persimmon Homes and its council partners.

Garden City 21 Partnership has already assembled a formidable team of expert consultants to tackle all aspects of sustainability including community architect John Thompson & Partners to win over the less than welcoming locals, landscape designer Whitelaw Turkington and environmental consultant ECD Energy and Environment.

Over the past 18 months consultant ECD Energy and Environment has found itself called in by an increasing number of housebuilders wanting advice on how to meet the environmental expectations of planners stemming from such drivers as Agenda 21. The consultant has to educate some planners as much as housebuilders.

“Planners equate environmentalism with things like Combined Heat and Power,” says John Doggart, managing director with the consultant. “In fact, boring things like insulation and facing the house in the right direction can achieve most of what you want for environmental sustainability. When we explain to housebuilders what they need to do they say - is that all? - but you’ve got to do it well.” That could be the housebuilder’s maxim for village development.