A new model for community-led regeneration, placemaking
Having visited so many sprawling car-based greenfield housing developments around our county towns, at last here is something that’s entirely different.
Frome’s Saxonvale site is a 12 acre brownfield area close to the town centre and is ideally placed for walking to the shops, cafes, pubs, getting the bus or going to the station. Yet just like many similar sites in our market towns, this one has laid derelict for years. So, while Frome is being surrounded by great bubbles of new housing estates spilling over the countryside, the local community is taking matters into their own hands buying the brownfield site near the centre, to build much more sustainably.
Vision-led development by the community
The vision is to build a new part of the town that is integrated with it, providing around 250 homes, an outdoor swimming pool, premises for small businesses, green infrastructure and more. Being in a good location for sustainable transport, car parking will be carefully limited and managed so that good urban planning and a human-scale and green public realm are the order of the day. You can read about the project on the Mayday Saxonvale web site.
How is it to be done?
When a site is to be developed for greenfield housing, after site promotion and outline planning permission has been obtained, parcels of land are generally sold to house-builders who then build and sell the homes. During the process there are financial gains to be made each of the parties involved.
In the case of Saxonvale it is the community that buys the land and the idea is to then use financial gains from development to benefit the local people rather than external shareholders. The Mayday Saxonvale development proposal borrows from the long-established Community Land Trust model and extends this to encompass an entire mixed-use neighbourhood, with land ownership, governance and some commercial assets intended to remain under community control for the long term.
Buying the land
To finance the acquisition and development, Mayday has proposed a Community Benefit Society (CBS) with a community share offer. Residents and supporters can buy community shares, with governance following the cooperative principle of one member, one vote, regardless of how much someone has invested. This is intended to prevent control being concentrated among the largest investors.
Further funding
If the Mayday Saxonvale product is successful in buying the land from Somerset Council, the project still naturally need finance to deliver the site. The organisers have secured £1.2m government-backed funding from the Resonance Community Developers Fund, backed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and their web site mentions partnering with Stories to take the development forward. If the community succeeds and the site is built according to their masterplan, this will surely be a first for any strategic site of this size.
Wider planning perspective
In the UK, the idea that a developer acquires the site, then finances the build, and recovers its investment through sales and lettings. However this much more characteristic of the UK than of many continental European countries. Elsewhere in Europe local authorities or public development corporations commonly take the lead in preparing and enabling large new housing areas before construction begins. Municipal planners often prepare masterplans and infrastructure often to their specification, and this is often true of brownfield sites too.
In England we do planning quite differently, with developers leading both in terms of the location of sites they want to build, and the masterplanning of sites under their control. Brownfield sites are usually much more expensive to build because of all the preparatory costs and yield less profit. Therefore in a commercially led system, it is no surprise that these are often left fallow for a very long time.
In this context it is very exciting to find a new approach to the system of developer-led planning in England whereby the community buys the land and then does the job that the public or developer sector have not. It will be an interesting story to follow.
Find out more
Meanwhile if readers are interested in following the project or even buying shares in the site, information is available on the Mayday Saxonvale website.