Imagine a new district of an old town, made up of multiple good things. Its blocks of flats, mostly four or five storeys high, would achieve what’s called “gentle density”, which means getting a good number of homes on to a piece of land without it feeling overcrowded. Their shared courtyard gardens, based on Danish and Swedish models, would help foster community life. It would be a place for all generations, different tenures and levels and affordability, of creative work and leisure as well as its energy-efficient homes. It would be designed by skilful and scrupulous architects and engineers, using materials such as cross-laminated timber and hemp to minimise its environmental impact.
Such, and more, is the promise of the Phoenix, a development of 685 homes, 30% of them affordable, proposed for the flat site of the former Phoenix ironworks on the edge of Lewes, the picturesque and steep-streeted county town of East Sussex. It looks, in a land where new homes are largely the lumpen products of volume housebuilders, miraculous, yet it won planning permission last month, and construction of the first phase is due to start early next year, with completion of the whole scheme scheduled for 2030.
