SOME KEY ISSUES

A MIXED COMMUNITY

Shops, schools and local community buildings, health care provision, access to transport, local recreation opportunities and safe and well designed public spaces all contribute to creating a successful community and a real sense of place.

We want to work with the present community to ensure that we provide what the community needs – such as a meeting place or community centre that provides space at an affordable cost for clubs and voluntary groups; good access to decent jobs, good schools and health care as well as everyday things such as sufficient areas for dog walking and for children’s play. 

A SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY

As the price of lighting and heating your home goes up, the need for more efficient homes becomes greater. Reducing the amount of CO² emissions from housing is one of the main ways to help tackle global warming.

That will mean achieving higher standards of design for buildings and open spaces, applying technology to make our buildings more efficient – providing grey water recycling, effective waste management and ways of reducing electricity consumption – and using sustainable means to generate heat and power where and when it is needed – using biomass fuels, wind generators and solar capture

A sustainable community is also about how we live. For example, we need to make sure that homes are matched with jobs, that we protect and improve the natural environment and that there are good recreational opportunities, that people have real incentives to walk, cycle or take the bus, there are safe routes to schools and that there are active measures to reduce crime.

HOUSING

The first question should always be ‘who will want to come and live here’?  The answer in this case is local people.

Statistics show that a majority of people moving to new housing move within a radius of 3 miles. They are people looking for better housing, bigger housing, a place to call their own for the first time, or a place to retire to which isn’t too far from their friends.

Our aim is provide the sort of homes that local people want, including:

• a range of different sorts of homes – houses, flats and bungalows
• a range of different house sizes - from one bedroom flats to houses for families
• a wide range of opportunities to get onto the housing ladder – including affordable homes to rent, innovative schemes to help people buy as much of their home as they can afford, and specialist schemes for the elderly that protect the equity that they have built up in their homes but provide the extra care they need.

LOCAL JOBS

Two of the concepts provide land for employment. We think that this location could be attractive to a wide variety of businesses including many small and medium sized enterprises most likely to employ local people.

Within this area we could provide a range of different types of employment – offices, workshops, warehousing.  We think the key will be to provide attractive and highly energy efficient workspaces at costs which are affordable, especially to smaller businesses.

RECREATION AND OPEN SPACE

Our vision proposes that about half the site would become public open space.  This creates numerous opportunities for formal and informal recreation activities. These could include:

• playing fields (football, cricket)
• tennis/basketball courts
• allotments
• an indoor sports centre
• an open air theatre
• a running track
• parkland
• a bmx/skateboarding arena
• water based recreation (in addition to continued use by the Angling Club)
• an equestrian centre
• footpaths and cycleways for quiet countryside pursuits
• an area reserved exclusively for nature conservation - from which the public could be excluded (unless supervised, eg a school nature study visit)
• an area set aside for festivals and celebrations (eg Bonfire Night, Diwali, Halloween), perhaps with a BBQs area. 

ACCESS AND TRAVEL

We want to encourage walking and cycling and create a community that is properly connected with its neighbours.  We also want people to make much more use of improved public transport - by creating places that can easily be served by buses, where stops are close to people’s houses and where they feel safe waiting for the next service.

Of course, people will still want to use their cars and so we need to ensure that local roads and junctions can cope with the expected traffic.  We also need to ensure our roads and junctions are safer and we avoid the need for speed humps and other afterthought measures as well as making certain there are enough car parking spaces to avoid the roads becoming clogged with parked vehicles.

YOUR PRIORITIES

OUR STANDARDS

Although we are not making any detailed proposals for development at this stage, all these factors have a bearing on preparing a Master Plan.  From the outset we aim to meet ‘best practice’ standards and wherever possible exceed those standards. We will extend this consideration to leisure and employment buildings as well as new homes and we will do this through Design Codes that will set out our objectives and how we intend to meet them.

We want to know what your priorities are – what sort of houses should there be and what sort of jobs should we be aiming to provide?  What sort of recreation facilities are most needed, what do you think ought to be the most important footpath and cycleway connections and what do you think of public transport? What other local facilities do you think should be provided and what other issues should we be taking into account? 

Please use our Questionnaire to tell us whether you agree with our vision for the area, what you think about the key issues and whether you think there are any other issues that we need to consider?