Standing in the way of a new footpath skirting Poole harbour is the RNLI’s gleaming national hub, where it builds five new lifeboats each year, refits the charity’s existing fleet and trains countless volunteers.
“It’s a shame the path stops dead and people can’t walk any further,” says Philip Broadhead, deputy leader of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) council. Access to water is essential to the charity’s twin-hangar complex, so walkers and cyclists will be diverted away from the waterfront for that section of the route.
The Tory-controlled council, a unitary authority covering some of the most valuable real estate on the south coast, is commissioning what will probably be the UK’s most expensive waterfront, part of a borough-wide development worth about £2.8bn. And like many local authorities before them, Broadhead and his colleagues must steer a course between the private interests of property developers and the public good.
But free-marketers might be surprised at their almost socialist emphasis on maintaining control, not just of the commissioning and planning phases, but for decades to come, as owner and steward of the land.
This ambitious urban design project was conceived using the latest thinking on creating communities that are both bustling and low carbon, with walking and cycling routes a cornerstone of the master plan.
Broadhead says he is pushing at an open door when he visits Michael Gove’s housing ministry. And the planning overhaul announced in the Queen’s speech, which effectively downgraded requirements for densely packed housing in favour of developments actively supported by local communities, will have given the council’s plans more impetus.
Poole is aiming to be very different from the overdeveloped seafronts that have cursed other rivieras in the UK and abroad. The vision is more Barcelona than Benidorm, with priority given to low-income households, schools, nurseries, shop refits and high-grade offices, rather than fancy flats for second home owners.
But that does not mean luxury is banned. The boatyard of yacht maker Sunseeker, which counts Nicole Kidman, Michael Douglas, Simon Cowell and John Travolta among its customers, also stands in the way of unrestricted waterside access. But in one of many consultation exercises, local people voted for it to remain.
They were accustomed to seeing the yard from the opposite quay, and liked watching a working factory. (Gravel cascading down chutes from cargo ships at a nearby quay was another must-stay attraction.) So the only matter the council has to negotiate with Sunseeker is the location of its marketing suites further along the waterfront, in a spot where hotels, bars and restaurants might be more appropriate.
Tony Travers, local government expert at the London School of Economics, says the scale of the project has a Tory heritage, chiming with the way the “great estates” manage their land. It also echoes the confidence of 19th-century leaders such as the Birmingham mayor Joseph Chamberlain, who built tramways, waterworks, schools and Britain’s largest estate of municipal housing.
“In the modern era, this is how the Grosvenor and Crown estates manage their land – taking a view not over a few years but centuries ahead,” he says. “They are often found micro-managing development.”
Broadhead and colleagues are well aware of the disasters that can befall overconfident councils. Several local authorities have gone down the Chamberlain track only to come unstuck. Croydon, Nottingham and Warrington are among those that funded energy or property development startups with borrowed money, only to crash and burn.
BCP’s leaders, who represent 400,000 residents, have set aside £50m for development work, of which £8m is earmarked for urban regeneration company FuturePlaces – with a plan to fund it all from specific savings the council expects to make over the next decade.
“It solves the problem of always going cap in hand to government,” says Broadhead, who is also chair of the Conservative councillors’ association and deputy chair of the mid-tier councils group Key Cities.
He has resisted packing the new entity’s board with councillors, preferring to appoint experts to run the “development brain”. One of them, managing director Gail Mayhew, was a member of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, formed in 2018 to advise on newbuilds: she has a wide brief to coordinate sites stretching round almost all of Poole’s harbour and bay.
Broadhead says they are “challenging many of the practices you see councils adopt”. Mayhew adds: “We are not just relying on planning rules. We are setting the ground rules and the terms of engagement.”
One of those rules covers land ownership, which councils usually avoid, even when they allow development on their own plots. Another is buying land that connects existing areas earmarked for development because, says Mayhew, “So much development is done on parcels of land, preventing a joined-up approach.”
Broadhead is going against type on transport too, choosing not to chase public money for new services to link local communities. He says more public transport crisscrossing the town is not the answer; rather, Poole needs something more akin to the Parisian 15-minute city or ville des proximités, as Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo calls it. The idea is to create neighbourhoods where the essentials of life are all available within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride.
Poole’s high streets are thriving, says Mayhew, so local communities can live, shop and eat out all in one place. “We want to be the wellbeing capital of the UK,” she says.
Many of the 15,000 homes in the master plan for the BCP area will be aimed at existing communities as well as incomers. She cites the vast former power station at Holes Bay, over a bridge from the town centre, as an example of sensitive expansion. The site had been vacant for 25 years, and on its own constitutes one of the UK’s biggest single-site developments.
Mayhew says studies show that few people cross the bridge to shop or meet friends in the town, so development will include more local schools, shops and workplaces, keeping the basics of life within easy reach.
The Centre for Cities thinktank has argued that employment should be the first consideration when councils invest, because if people have good jobs they can afford all the other elements of urban life. But to attract employers, the council knows it needs cultural life and good schools.
Mayhew says businesses are often forgotten in the rush to build homes, which is why Poole’s port – with its freight services to France and docking for midsize cruise ships, and employers such as Sunseeker and the RNLI – will be embraced. And not just by the council: to those enjoying a night out on the quay, a view of the town’s industrial heart is as important as the natural landscape beyond.
• This article was amended on 30 May 2022. Figures referring to 15,000 new homes and £2.8bn of development are in relation to the entire council area, not just Poole or the Poole waterfront development. The council has set aside £50m to accelerate growth, but only £8m of that is for the FuturePlaces regeneration company, not the whole amount. And the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission was formed in 2018, not 2013.
