Placemaking - Building Welborne Beautiful

The way that places are planned, designed, built and managed has a significant influence over whether communities are able to live healthy lives. The built and natural environments are important determinants of health and shape health inequalities.

Welborne is designed to be a community for twenty-first-century life, but one that looks to the past to learn lessons from the tried and tested principles of Britain's rich heritage of placemaking.  It takes its cues from the villages and Garden Cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, places such as Bournville, Letchworth Garden City, Port Sunlight and Welwyn Garden City. These are settlements that were based on strong foundations of employment, beautiful design, sociability and long-term stewardship, and a century and more after their foundation they continue to uphold and be admired for these qualities.

These places share a set of characteristics and principles that underpin the thinking behind the Welborne vision:

• Holistically planned: the development has a comprehensive masterplan, flexible enough to evolve over time
• Patient investment: there is commitment to early investment in community infrastructure that reflects a long-term approach to returns
• Single master developer: the lifespan of the development is guided by a single master developer, who ensures that the original vision is maintained
• Well-being: the development is planned in a way that fosters healthy and active living through access to green space, connection to nature, provision for walking and cycling and the opportunity to grow food locally
• High-quality design: keen attention is paid to detail and high-quality materials sensitive to the architecture and landscape character of the local area and results in a distinctive and recognisable identity
• Landscape: the development is informed by and augments the natural environment, including an extensive green infrastructure network
• Economic purpose: the development includes locally accessible employment
• Services and amenities: the development provides a range of services to meet day-to-day needs within walking distances of homes
• Diversity of housing: the development includes a diversity of housing opportunities reflecting a 'whole-of-life' ethos, with regard to the needs of older people and genuinely affordable housing
• Long-term stewardship:  A defined arrangement for how the community's assets will be looked after in perpetuity and a principle of active management and maintenance of the public realm and community infrastructure

More information about developing new communities and placemaking can be found on the TCPA's website .

You can find a Building Welborne Beautiful brochure here (2 MB).

It was confirmed in October 2024 that funding to deliver critical infrastructure is now in place, and the announcement confirming the M27 Junction 10 improvements means all 6,000 new homes at Welborne can be built. You can find out more about the progress here (364 KB).

Find out more by visiting our other Welborne pages:

• Welcome to Welborne Garden Village
• The Story So Far...
• Introducing the Master Developer
• Planning for Development
• Housing
• Sustainable Welborne
• Community Forum and Events
• Welborne in the news