The Garden City: Past, Present and Future

Stephen Victor Ward (Taylor & Francis, 1992)

Just a few other precedents exist of private villages on green field sites. The design and layout of all these schemes has stuck closely to the standard formula favoured by the volume builders, based on discrete clusters of houses along loops or culs-de-sac, to maximise marketability and minimise capital locked up in the ground.

Perhaps the best example is Martlesham Heath (3500 population), developed by the Bradford Property Trust on the 600-acre site of an old aerodrome in Suffolk. The land had come to the Trust as a windfall - by reversion of the lease from the Air Ministry - and had clear development potential because of its location on the edge of Ipswich and nearby the expanding container port of Felixstowe.

The owners and their advisors, Bidwells of Cambridge declared at the outset that their aim was to build 'a village', not 'a housing estate', i.e. a place with:

• groups of houses rather than rows of identical buildings
• a village store shops and pub overlooking a green
• schools
• open space
• variety
• a community pride in itself

Martlesham Heath received planning permission in 1973 and was completed in 1990.

Described in its publicity brochure as 'an internationally admired model of town planning' comparable to the public new towns of the 1950s and 1960s, the master plan by Clifford Culpin provides for housing to be developed in twelve hamlets strung along a looping distributor road. There is a village centre, built around a square with shops and a pub. The messes, barrack blocks and hangars of the aerodrome have been transformed into a thriving light industrial estate that the premises of two major employers - the British Telecom Research Centre and the Suffolk County Police Headquarters - stand on adjacent land.

Since 1988 the county and district planning authorities have given Martlesham the accolade of designating it a village and approving policies that should protect in perpetuity the landscaped spaces between the hamlets. Gillian Darley has described Martlesham Heath as 'a tasteful prosperous one-off enclave but a place of distinctive original Character'. The developers have achieved all their original objectives except that of social variety, for although some of the stock has been developed for renting none of it is affordable to the manual worker.