Martlesham Heath - An Unorthodox Development

Over the last three decades much has been written about Martlesham Heath and the unorthodox approach taken in its development.

Each of the following (clickable) extracts refer to an article or paper where the village is mentioned in this context.

A Revolt Against Convention

A new development, rather than the spoliation of existing village communities, seemed a possible way of breaking out from the orthodoxy of the now traditional housing estate...

A Village of Vision?

The qualities of a village are notoriously hard to define. The only certainty is that the physical and social mesh of the village, that most subtle thing, is slow to evolve, slower still to dissolve...

The Garden City: Past, Present and Future

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...

History of The Bradford Property Trust Limited 1928-1978

The largest of the wartime purchases, the 7,420 acre Brightwell estate near Ipswich Suffolk, formed the basis of a thirty five year project that is only now (1978) coming to fruition. Brightwell included freehold rights to the Royal Air Force airfield at Martlesham...

The Culpin Partnership

Typical housing projects include: Master plan and some neighbourhood areas in the new village at Martlesham Heath...

The Bidwell Dynasty

Since 1840 surveying firm Bidwells has been quietly building a reputation in East Anglia...

Urban Regeneration - The Importance of Place Making

Fifty years on, they are not gated worlds, they are enclaves, (middle class ghettos maybe), of owners bonded together by a compulsory management company. The Bradford Property Trust behind Martlesham Heath in Suffolk demonstrates the same management priority on the scale of a small town. This thinking ahead is what so few developers appreciate and only makes sense when building on a large scale...

Community Support and Neighbourhood Size

This paper is a commentary on previous material on neighbourhoods...

Suffolk Coastal Local Plan

Basically, the overall physical and design principle which emanates from the original social concept is one of a series of hamlets separated from each other by wide areas of open space. The District Council has sought, and will continue to uphold the principles of this concept, and, accordingly, once these hamlets have been fully developed there will be no potential for further development...