New homes conveniently situated on the bypass

New ‘urban extension’ in construction on the fringe of Warminster.

The rural county of Wiltshire has a housing target of around 2,000 new homes per annum with most of these built (or proposed to be built) on greenfield sites in the countryside around Chippenham, Salisbury, Melksham, Trowbridge, Warminster and various small local towns and villages. The July 2024 consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework, which comes with an entirely new algorithm for calculating housing targets for each local planning authority, raises the target to 3,476 homes, a very large increase for the country. More car-based sprawl is very likely.

The 2021 census, which has statistics on car ownership, shows clearly how new fringe-of-town developments like those seen in Wiltshire, tend to end up as places where many households have two or more cars. You can have a look at the ONS car ownership maps yourself online. Certainly during our visits to many new bubbles of ‘urban extensions’ to country towns, we have seen residents taking up a car-based life style.

Off the bypass

New homes in the rural counties that we have visited are generally built at low density and are often located near a major road junction for easy commuting and getaway by car, with new distributor roads opening up the land for building. A favourite location is therefore on countryside between a bypass and the town where fields are available for building and developers can sell the location close to a major road, as much as the new homes themselves.

An example in Wiltshire

With this in mind we visited a large area of new homes still in construction between the A36 Warminster bypass and the town itself, to see the development so far. The location in Wiltshire was just near to the National Trust’s Cley Hill and the photo is a zoomed-in view of the new housing from there. The development will eventually have 1,000 new homes with access at two new roundabouts on roads leading directly to the bypass, and linked by a central spine road running through the estate.

The red line of the development

Red line boundary of the development

The extent of the housing area is shown by the red line in the planning application documentation. The edge of the small town of Warminster is shown with the new area marked with the line of the A36 trunk road running along the northern edge. The transport assessment for the planning application shows that traffic going onto the A36 at the two roundabouts goes up 41.9% and 24.3% respectively during the am and pm peak.

warminster station

The visit

We started our visit at Warminster station which has an hourly service to and from Bath, and in the other way, to Salisbury. Just near the station are a supermarket and a number of retail units that would normally be built out of town, and this has no doubt helped to keep it vibrant. It was easy to walk from the station to the town centre.

Warminster High Street was quite busy with many old buildings and pavements have been made wider for pedestrians. The road out to the new housing area (shown in the photo) was however very narrow in parts, with cars waiting to let each other pass as they squeeze past the many interesting buildings in a historic part of town. It was better to be on foot!

There was a bus out to where the new estate was being built, but you needed to be in the right place at the right time to catch it. The Warminster to Frome bus was available for the purpose, but the service is infrequent (hourly and not in the evenings) and did not tie in with train arrival times (also hourly). It seemed easier to walk although this turned out to be longer than first thought! A bus was sighted on the way.

On road to the new housing from the town centre there was a good convenience store serving the existing outer suburbs. It was then about 15 minutes walk from the shop to the entrance of the estate along a suburban road leading out of town towards the bypass.

Here is the entrance to Jubilee Gardens off a big new roundabout. We did notice that traffic noise from the A36 could be heard as it is under a minute’s drive away from here.

It was interesting to see an advertisement placed in the area between the road and the housing for those wanting to build ‘road side services’, but there was no indication whether this might mean a petrol station or a drive-though takeaway, or something else.

The new homes benefit from ample parking – usually two spaces per home. Some affordable homes had already been built, although with average wages locally in Warminster apparently quite low, with the added expense of running probably two cars, they may not be ideal for all. The market homes we suspect, appeal more to those moving in from other places, especially given the proximity to the A36 trunk road.

It was good to see pavements being built in the new estate, and some areas of front gardens, although plans show a lot of space allocated to parking and associated driveways.

The estate was still in construction. You can see the Wiltshire countryside around it. We understood that the future, there would be a bus through the new estate but exactly when the service would start, or how frequent it would be, was uncertain.

The new homes that we visited on the outskirts of Warminster was typical of many developments on the edge of market towns and we have seen many others like it. With housing targets high for many rural local authorities, a large number of similar estates are being built.

As shown by the transport assessments in outline planning applications, such developments do create a large amount of traffic affecting country roads and the strategic road network, with great expense associated with ‘mitigation’ (bigger road junctions and so on). In terms of life-styles, it is generally not be easy to live in this kind of place without driving (or being driven), and this is the situation for hundreds of similar developments being built on greenfield sites in areas with very limited public transport.

We believe that a better way of building new homes is possible, with new homes in more sustainable locations, at higher density and orientated around new and modern public transport. This is an important theme for Transport for New Homes and readers may be interested in Metrowest Bath and Wiltshire in this context, joint work being done by ourselves, Connected Cities and Amey rail.

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