You might have heard of Poundbury, the project by the man who is now King to build a traditionally styled town on the edge of Dorchester in Dorset, where 1,700 homes have been built over 30 years on land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall, the 52,000-hectare (128,000-acre) estate that has now passed to Prince William. It’s widely touted as a solution to housing demand – if you make new development attractive enough, is the theory, local opposition recedes and new residents flock to live there. It inspires imitations: the duchy itself is building along similar lines on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall, and has plans to do so at Faversham in Kent.
You probably won’t have heard of Houlton, a town now growing on 473 hectares (1,170 acres) on the edge of Rugby in Warwickshire. Its development has been led not by royalty but by Urban&Civic, a property company owned by the Wellcome Trust, and Aviva investors, and masterplanned by David Lock Associates and JTP. But with more than 1,000 homes built in five years out of an eventual 6,200, it can claim to be more effective than Poundbury at getting a desirable new community through the planning system and then building it. Urban&Civic have 14 such developments under way, Houlton included, all but one within 100 miles of London, on which they have planning permission for a total of 33,000 homes.
