Our Town, Let’s Own It

This week Somerset Council announced that real estate investment managers Newcore Capital was its preferred buyer for the 12-acre Saxonvale brownfield site in Frome, over a resident-led regeneration project which aimed to to bring Saxonvale into permanent community ownership. 

This got me thinking about the expansive housing development happening around the small market town in which I live, Malmesbury, and how difficult it is to balance protecting natural landscapes, meeting community housing need and the developer's desire to maximise shareholder profits from the sale of the new homes.

To quote Ken Worpole "thanks to efforts by wildlife organisations and ecologists, we have become pretty sophisticated in recreating wildlife habitats where bio-diversity flourishes anew, but when we look at the habitats created around new housing developments they are invariably sterile and at complete odds with their environmental setting. We can make a home in the landscape for the nightingale and the crested newt but we haven’t yet learned how to do this for people.  You have to have a political and environmental aesthetic at work in new community-building, otherwise it is just bricks and mortar and feeder roads: residential compounds set in an unloved and unvisited quasi-rural hinterland.  The statistics about how far people walk from their homes in new housing developments is pretty shocking – most, never at all".

Images from Mayday Saxonvale - Our Town, Let's Own It