Sam Stafford's Blog

Placemaking. Who does it, and who do they do it for? Communities. Are they created? If so how, and by whom? These were the weighty questions that came to mind as we watched the second episode of The New Builds Are Coming last week. The first episode was about a draft allocation bomb being dropped upon an unsuspecting rural community. The second episode focused on new communities: from their inception and design to the people who live there. In the ‘frenzy of construction of Oxfordshire’, it was asked, who ‘creates the foundations of community?’ The programme featured two fairly typical urban extensions on the edge of market towns and a smaller scheme on the edge of what planners might call a ‘main rural centre’. Longford Park, Banbury, according to it’s website ( https://www.longford-park.com/ ), is about “far more than new homes, it is a community in the making and a place that people will be proud to call home”. It is being built by Taylor Wimpey, Bovis and Barratt and as...

It is not often that my wife and I watch television together, but last night two of our interests aligned (hers: fly-on-the-wall docu-soaps, mine: concreting over green fields) and so we watched The New Builds Are Coming . (As an early aside, when planning was in the limelight previously the series was called The Planners Are Coming . I wonder why producers feel the need to associate the subject with an impending sense of doom?) There was a discussion about it in the office yesterday morning and I simply expressed a hope that it would feature a plan-led proposal in the hope that this would show the planning system in a better light than a 5YHLS ‘smash and grab’. I also expressed a hope that it would be fair, in that it would portray each actor within the five act play that is the local plan process in the light that they deserve to be. Of those actors, firstly, the developer, or promoter, and the landowner. Neither wanted to engage with the programme, we were told, which could ...