How to create a town

In June, Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, stood in front of a giant hoarding in a picturesque but otherwise seemingly ordinary meadow in Hampshire. Printed on the hoarding was a life-size CGI depiction of two pretty English terraced cottages, complete with neat hedgerows, leafy planting and brightly painted front doors. He was visiting the site of a new town – one that hasn’t been built yet.

Welborne Garden Village is, to quote Gove, “a model for the future”; a thoughtfully planned, designed and constructed new settlement that’s been masterminded by Buckland, an organisation that was formed by landowner Mark Thistlethwayte in 2006 to deliver affordable housing and jobs through “a new town that will look as good in 50 or 100 years’ time as it does the day it is built”.

A new vision for town-building

With placemaking and a sense of stewardship at its heart, Thistlethwayte’s ambition for Welborne is a radically different vision of town-building to that of most local authorities or developers, who sell land to volume housebuilders to build ‘identikit’ homes. 

When it is finished, Welborne will offer 6,000 comfortable homes, together with four new schools, shops, community facilities, two buzzing village centres and green spaces. And, it’ll have been designed to look chocolate box pretty, with multiple complementary architectural styles and complex streets that look as though they’ve been added to organically over centuries.

It might, though, be a generation before Buckland sees a meaningful return on its investment. “It has an incredible long- term, multi-generational perspective,” says Charlie Dugdale, Head of Development Partnerships at Knight Frank. “Many of the landowners we work with, Buckland included, have a very strong sense of custodial responsibility for their land which can be harnessed through partnership. 

Normally, landowners will sell off their land and lose control of what’s built on it. Of course, they are well within their rights to do that, but landowners like Mark are a clear illustration that there is a different choice.”

That choice, believe it or not, is to build a new town yourself. Dugdale specialises in helping landowners actively participate in the creation of brand new settlements and extensions to towns and villages in the best possible way, drawing on the model employed by the Duchy of Cornwall at Poundbury, King Charles III’s own new-built urban extension to Dorchester, which is scheduled for completion in 2026. 

“We help landowners to harness their custodial responsibilities into a development model,” he says. “We form long- term development partnerships between landowners and master developers that support the delivery of brand new settlements with good quality placemaking on a long-term investment horizon.”

He uses the analogy of people who have spent a lifetime growing and maintaining a beautiful garden. “After a lifetime of thoughtful pruning and propagation, no gardener wants to sell their house to someone who will destroy its vitality, dig it all up and lay down cheap plastic grass. Our clients are no different; to them selling development land to a volume housebuilder can often feel just the same, and they’d far sooner keep control and ensure the legacy of their labour is preserved for the long-term benefit of all.”

Designing livable spaces

We’re chatting in the London office of another figure who’s instrumental in creating settlements from scratch, architect Ben Pentreath, recently described by Michael Gove as an “aesthetic genius,” who has designed many of the streets and buildings at Poundbury and masterplanned Welborne. Now, Pentreath and his team are turning to the daunting task of designing the settlement’s 6,000-plus buildings, street by street.

“In a sense, we’re two links in a chain that have to pull together,” Pentreath says, leaning back in his office chair. “Charlie helps landowners to work out whether they want to undertake a long-term placemaking project, and then helps them to understand how they do it. Whereas, our job is to help shape these developments, plan them and design them.”

At this scale, and with this level of ambition, that’s easier said than done, but it’s also a challenge that Pentreath relishes. “A volume house builder wouldn’t want to go near a mixed-use development with streets featuring a mix of accommodation, businesses, shops, civic buildings – all in different styles that feel organically different,” he says. “It’s tricky to realise this mix, but it’s a key component. 

The broader social infrastructure of schools, doctor’s surgeries, town halls – that’s all part of what makes new developments like Welborne special. Some sense of social and economic exchange is at the heart of every great place in history – be it large or small.” 

Commitment to new towns

It also adds a huge amount of long-term social and financial value, as Dugdale explains: “In 2020, Knight Frank undertook some research for the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. We compared Poundbury with Elvetham Heath – the most similarly sized development we could find in southern England. Both have around 1,900 homes. One has nurtured 207 businesses creating work for over 2,300 people, the other four businesses. It’s easy to see which is the garden with plastic grass, and which is flourishing.”

It’s going to be another year before Welborne welcomes its first residents, and many more before it’s finished, but it remains a fascinating blueprint for purposeful town-building, and it’s just one of several new placemaking developments that Dugdale is working on across the UK. “New towns have become an inter-generational commitment from responsible landowners,” he says. 

“When you connect a landowner with the right builder, architect and masterplanner who are prepared to work with them, you give the landowner a choice to do something very special.”

Read more about Welborne Garden Village at welborne.co.uk. To speak with Knight Frank’s Development Partnerships Team, email charles.dugdale@knightfrank.com.