Sustainable living in the UK is challenging. It requires pushing against the norm and making active choices on how to live and what to buy while navigating a car-centric built environment.
But in Cambridgeshire, an 11,000 new home development called Waterbeach New Town is aiming to disrupt the status quo. This 1,200-acre site is designed for integrated sustainable living and is set to become the country’s first purpose-built, ‘cycling-first’ community.
It’s already been a decade in the making and could offer multiple lessons for the UK government as it embarks on its ambitious plans to build 12 new towns, each the size of Waterbeach.
The Waterbeach New Town site lies just 9km north of Cambridge. It’s essentially two development projects that will gradually merge over the next 20 years to create a new community. Urban & Civic is developing the larger 716-acre site on the former Waterbeach Barracks, a World War Two RAF bomber command airfield it acquired from the Ministry of Defence.
The new community is based on an integrated sustainable design that utilises the brownfield site’s current characteristics, a 23-acre lake and 34 acres of ecology landscapes to balance the planned 6,500 low-carbon new homes, five schools and new town centre with retail, health, and leisure facilities. It’s organised around an innovative ‘cycle-first’ streetscape, inspired by the Dutch district of Vathorst, with over 40km of on- and off-site cycle ways planned to de-prioritise cars and reduce the need for roads. The project is currently in phase one with its first residents moving in two years ago.
To the east of the former barracks is the Waterbeach Development Company (WDC), a joint venture between Aquila Investments, Royal London Asset Management and Turnstone Estates. It has outline planning permission to develop an adjacent parcel of land. This includes 4,500 new homes, three schools, 24,800m2 of ‘employment space’ and a 20-acre country park. It has also embedded sustainability and cycling first principles into its masterplan. “We are building a new community that will place cyclists and pedestrians at its heart,” says Chris Goldsmith, chair of Turnstone Estates, “creating an environmentally conscious and future-proofed development.”
Bikes parked at the cafe in Waterbeach
Prioritising active lifestyles
Both developments will play a key role in meeting local housing demand and are included in the South Cambridgeshire Local Plan. But what makes Waterbeach so significant is that while providing new homes and community facilities it is also able to prioritise sustainability and active, healthy lifestyles.
“I think it comes back to the importance of sustainability being built in from the outset,” says Fiona Reardon-Rose, communications and partnerships manager at Urban & Civic. “We have a real focus on strategic sites and as a master developer that allows us to embed that [sustainability] into the design.”
This master builder model means Urban & Civic will have oversight of the scheme from start to finish. As a sustainability-focused developer (it follows its own sustainability framework and net zero commitment) it factors in infrastructure like biodiversity habitats or active travel schemes at the outset before parcelling off serviced land to housebuilders.
While sustainability-focused developers set the vision for Waterbeach, there was a particular conflation of local factors that drove the detail of its cycling-first approach. Waterbeach is situated in one of England’s most pro-cycling areas. One of its busiest routes, which sees 800 cyclists per hour at peak, is currently being redesigned to de-prioritise cars, led by a partnership of Cambridge’s local authorities.
This pro-cycling scheme was driven through planning with the local authority stipulating ‘sustainable movement’ and no additional pressure on the existing road network. Add in an active local campaign group, Camcycle, and the scene was set.
Stina Hokby, associate partner at Fletcher Priest Architects, the master plan designer, says while cycling wasn’t the only guiding principle in the Waterbeach design they were trying to create something that “pushed boundaries” and was best practice. “It’s really about how you tie into existing networks,” she says. “So, looking at that macro scale but also zooming in to really tangible things like cycle parking and creating conditions where the easiest option is to take your bike.”
She adds that both the local council and Camcycle took part in design discussions and contributed to the decision to use filtered permeability, a Dutch planning technique that prioritises cyclists and pedestrians over cars. The first phase of this grid system is already in place, including the installation of a 90m bridge linking the site’s cycle routes directly to Cambridge city centre.
The cycle-first policy has also filtered through to the organisation of new homes and surprisingly to the first new primary school which, when it opens in 2027, will have only cycle and walking routes to its front door. “It’s definitely interesting to look at what you can do through the lens of cycling, but it has loads of other beneficial consequences,” says Hokby.
“The station relocation, alongside the new greenway and busway, will ensure a sustainable new town” Tim Deacon MRICS, Turnstone Estates
Cafe by the lake at Waterbeach
Station relocation
On the eastern part of the site, led by WDC, development is dependent on the relocation of the local train station, moving it 2.4km north to sit in the new town. The £43m project was greenlit in July and is set to be complete by 2027. “We can now begin to plan in earnest thousands of homes for South Cambridgeshire,” says Tim Deacon MRICS, managing director of WDC partner Turnstone Estates. “The station relocation, alongside the new greenway and busway, will ensure a sustainable new town, with active travel and public transport being options for people from the day they move into their new homes.”
Urban & Civic is currently planning phase two, including 2,500 homes, a secondary and another primary school, plus the new town centre, which will focus around the former barracks area of the site. But Reardon-Rose says physical development is only part of the picture – fostering a sense of community is “absolutely critical”. Part of this is providing community spaces for local and new residents, with over 60 groups already using its facilities.
It also has schemes such as a new bus service to foster more sustainable active travel and is considering running car groups to further reduce reliance on cars. “I think it’s important that everything we design is for everyone. It’s a big thing to happen on people’s doorsteps so we want to ensure that we bring the whole community on that journey with us.”
For a government looking to develop 12 new towns, Waterbeach could provide a fascinating blueprint. On paper it is set to meet the area’s housing need, while also prioritising sustainability and active lifestyles. But it has not been without its challenges and Hokby says understanding the time it takes to “grow something” is really important. “We established a principle about growing a new town rather than dropping a new place in,” she says.
“That really became something that guided us through all the design stages. It’s about not designing everything from day one but agreeing on the starting principle, and we should be really ambitious about what we can do.”
