Post by Sherford on Jul 6, 2006 22:35:38 GMT
property.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14051-2171031,00.html
Twinned with Poundbury
Devon planners are hoping that a new community that takes its cue from Prince Charles’s model village development will get the green light, says Hugh Pearman of The Sunday Times
Any new project with Prince Charles’s name attached to it is bound to stir comment. And this one is a biggie: an entirely new town to be built over the green fields of the Sherford Valley outside Plymouth in Devon. In the next 20-25 years, some 4,500 homes will be built, along with schools, shops, a hospital and a fast bus link to the city. So is this Poundbury Mark II — a scaled-up version of the Prince of Wales’s famous throwback new model suburb of Poundbury, Dorchester? Well, not quite. Poundbury was built on Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall land and is his personal hobby, embodying his die-hard traditionalist views on architecture. The Sherford New Community, to give it its working title, will be very different. Charles does not own or control the land there. Nor has he been directly involved. Heavens above, even modern architecture will be allowed — so long as it is not too brutish. So what’s the connection? It’s this. Architects and academics from the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, an educational charity, have been advising on New Sherford. As evolved between the foundation, the local authorities and Redtree, the developer, it will be more like a British equivalent of Seaside, the “new urbanist” development on Florida’s northwest coast that has been mightily influential among planners.
Seaside has enjoyed rocketing house prices and was used as Jim Carrey’s home town in the hit film The Truman Show. It is seen as a lodestone by the new urbanists, who think places should be for people rather than cars and megastores.
New Sherford needed direction. This new community was fiercely resisted by locals, who hated the fact that it would be built across farmland rather than on “brownfield” land. Their protests were in vain: the scheme was adopted in 2004. Then, it was seen as a collection of linked villages. When the scheme’s backers started to think hard about the place, they called in the foundation for advice. And as its director, American urbanist Hank Dittmar, says, the original idea was all wrong.
“They were called villages, but I would call them housing estates. Our task was: how to make it into a sustainable town and define the boundaries of its growth?” By rearranging the proposed sprawling estates into one town with a centre and a high street with shops — laid out along roads designed to slow down traffic — the area of countryside lost to development will be much reduced, he says. It is a tighter development than the original proposal, but even so there will be room for all kinds of house types, from social-rent flats to detached family houses. This is nothing to do with architectural style: such high-density, anti-suburban solutions are almost universally favoured by planning experts — though all too often ignored by housebuilders and local authorities.
The Prince’s Foundation is getting pretty busy these days, being called in to help master-plan developments all over the country. Northampton, Aldershot, Harlow and Lincoln have all called on its services. Dittmar calls these “exemplar developments”, and although Charles is much more hands-off than he used to be, he still gets to see progress reports on all the projects, says Dittmar. New Sherford will be no exception. And yes, modernists will be welcome. “
People forget that the design codes for Seaside were intended to allow modern as well as traditional buildings. We’re not so concerned with style. We want to frame the public realm.”
“Design codes” are a hot topic among today’s urbanists. They are ground rules for what may or may not be built — how big, what materials, and so on. The idea is to allow variation while preventing monstrosities. The theory is that style becomes irrelevant, since designing a house in such a context is no different from adding a new building to an existing town.
Whatever, New Sherford is destined to be both new and old-fashioned: sustainable, providing 5,000 jobs, generating a lot of its own power, and being walkable. The planning application will be made this autumn.
Crucially, it aims to steer clear of the usual-suspect housebuilders. Redtree, a new face on the scene, was set up specifically for this venture. But the people involved aren’t novices: the Royal Bank of Scotland is handling the finances, and the rest are a mix of business interests with planning and development expertise.
James Koe, the project’s director at Redtree, aims to develop the town directly, rather than farm out parcels of land to the familiar spec-builder names. Housebuilders only know how to build houses, he says — not communities. As he bluntly puts it: “Anyone with a track record in the past 50 years is pretty much admitting to failure.”
So, if it’s going to be so great, won’t house prices there shoot up out of reach? “The marketplace will always respond to quality,” says Dittmar. “In the long run, our response is that there should be more communities that people like, where housebuilders are competing on quality.”
And do you know? I don’t think anyone but the most cynical volume housebuilder would disagree with him.
Twinned with Poundbury
Devon planners are hoping that a new community that takes its cue from Prince Charles’s model village development will get the green light, says Hugh Pearman of The Sunday Times
Any new project with Prince Charles’s name attached to it is bound to stir comment. And this one is a biggie: an entirely new town to be built over the green fields of the Sherford Valley outside Plymouth in Devon. In the next 20-25 years, some 4,500 homes will be built, along with schools, shops, a hospital and a fast bus link to the city. So is this Poundbury Mark II — a scaled-up version of the Prince of Wales’s famous throwback new model suburb of Poundbury, Dorchester? Well, not quite. Poundbury was built on Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall land and is his personal hobby, embodying his die-hard traditionalist views on architecture. The Sherford New Community, to give it its working title, will be very different. Charles does not own or control the land there. Nor has he been directly involved. Heavens above, even modern architecture will be allowed — so long as it is not too brutish. So what’s the connection? It’s this. Architects and academics from the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, an educational charity, have been advising on New Sherford. As evolved between the foundation, the local authorities and Redtree, the developer, it will be more like a British equivalent of Seaside, the “new urbanist” development on Florida’s northwest coast that has been mightily influential among planners.
Seaside has enjoyed rocketing house prices and was used as Jim Carrey’s home town in the hit film The Truman Show. It is seen as a lodestone by the new urbanists, who think places should be for people rather than cars and megastores.
New Sherford needed direction. This new community was fiercely resisted by locals, who hated the fact that it would be built across farmland rather than on “brownfield” land. Their protests were in vain: the scheme was adopted in 2004. Then, it was seen as a collection of linked villages. When the scheme’s backers started to think hard about the place, they called in the foundation for advice. And as its director, American urbanist Hank Dittmar, says, the original idea was all wrong.
“They were called villages, but I would call them housing estates. Our task was: how to make it into a sustainable town and define the boundaries of its growth?” By rearranging the proposed sprawling estates into one town with a centre and a high street with shops — laid out along roads designed to slow down traffic — the area of countryside lost to development will be much reduced, he says. It is a tighter development than the original proposal, but even so there will be room for all kinds of house types, from social-rent flats to detached family houses. This is nothing to do with architectural style: such high-density, anti-suburban solutions are almost universally favoured by planning experts — though all too often ignored by housebuilders and local authorities.
The Prince’s Foundation is getting pretty busy these days, being called in to help master-plan developments all over the country. Northampton, Aldershot, Harlow and Lincoln have all called on its services. Dittmar calls these “exemplar developments”, and although Charles is much more hands-off than he used to be, he still gets to see progress reports on all the projects, says Dittmar. New Sherford will be no exception. And yes, modernists will be welcome. “
People forget that the design codes for Seaside were intended to allow modern as well as traditional buildings. We’re not so concerned with style. We want to frame the public realm.”
“Design codes” are a hot topic among today’s urbanists. They are ground rules for what may or may not be built — how big, what materials, and so on. The idea is to allow variation while preventing monstrosities. The theory is that style becomes irrelevant, since designing a house in such a context is no different from adding a new building to an existing town.
Whatever, New Sherford is destined to be both new and old-fashioned: sustainable, providing 5,000 jobs, generating a lot of its own power, and being walkable. The planning application will be made this autumn.
Crucially, it aims to steer clear of the usual-suspect housebuilders. Redtree, a new face on the scene, was set up specifically for this venture. But the people involved aren’t novices: the Royal Bank of Scotland is handling the finances, and the rest are a mix of business interests with planning and development expertise.
James Koe, the project’s director at Redtree, aims to develop the town directly, rather than farm out parcels of land to the familiar spec-builder names. Housebuilders only know how to build houses, he says — not communities. As he bluntly puts it: “Anyone with a track record in the past 50 years is pretty much admitting to failure.”
So, if it’s going to be so great, won’t house prices there shoot up out of reach? “The marketplace will always respond to quality,” says Dittmar. “In the long run, our response is that there should be more communities that people like, where housebuilders are competing on quality.”
And do you know? I don’t think anyone but the most cynical volume housebuilder would disagree with him.