The chief officer of the council covering one of Norwich’s key expansion zones has said the authority wants growth, but not at any cost.

Broadland district council chief executive Phil Kirby delivered the opening keynote presentation at Built Environment Networking’s Norwich Development Plans seminar, which took place last Thursday (16th September) in the city.

He said: “We take investment and development very seriously but we make sure that this does not come at the expense of our heritage and history that we are rightly proud of.

“We are supportive of new developments that provide the growth that Broadlands need to deliver its full potential. However we are acutely aware of the importance of ensuring that any new homes are well-built and adaptable and underpinned by adequate infrastructure.”

“Broadland is a fantastic place to invest in and we are looking to build a great new community.”

But Kirby said Broadland, as a member of the Greater Norwich Development Partnership that covers the city and its surrounding districts, was keen to encourage new housing.

“We know there is not enough housing for the existing population,” he said, pointing out that Broadland has more than 3,000 households on its waiting list, a figure which he said is increasing at a rate of 10% year on year.

In addition, he said the district was also a magnet for inward migration.

“We are proud that so many want to move to Broadland. We know it’s a very attractive location, but as a consequence local people are being priced out. If there are no adequate housing opportunities for local people they will leave.”

He said these issues were addressed in Broadland’s economic development plan, which is due to be published in the coming months.

As proof of Broadland’s commitment to well planned, high quality development, he pointed to the proposed community at Beeston Green (see case study below) and the eco-town site at Rackheath.

The Beeston Green community is located in an area to the north east of Norwich, which has been identified as the Growth Triangle, for which Broadland has submitted an area action plan to the government for approval.

Kirby also highlighted 14 homes that the council’s new joint venture company was building to the blue chip environmental ‘Passivhaus’ standard. He said the scheme, which is the first of its kind, underlined the council’s “interest in developing the right housing.”

He also said the council had supported plans for a new local distributor route, a dual carriage way road running straight through the district, linking strategic employment sites in north Norwich and Broadland, as well as improving access to Norwich Airport.

“It will facilitate growth in places that Broadland considers best able to take it,” he said, adding that the road is currently up for consent.

CASE STUDY: BEESTON GREEN- A NEW MARKET TOWN TAKES SHAPE

A new market town is how Neil Murphy of Beyond Green describes Beeston Green, the ambitious new 3,500 home development that his company is promoting to the north of Norwich.

Speaking at the BEN’s Norwich Development Plans seminar, Murphy said: “The vision is to create a new Broadlands market town. We want it to have the quality of traditional, well resolved communities where it is easy and attractive to live sustainably.”

“We aim to replicate quality of places people like. We’re not slavish classicists but believe that there’s a lot to be learned from the past.”

The scheme is the first on which Beyond Green, which has until now largely acted as a consultant on regeneration and development projects, has acted as promoter.

Beeston Green’s key features include :

3,520 homes, up to 33% of which should be affordable

The creation of up to 1000 jobs via 16,800m²ofbusiness and employment space including office buildings, incubators, workshops and studios for small businesses and start-ups and an enterprise ‘hub’ to support micro companies and homeworkers

8,800m²of‘highstreet’retail and services development

Two small hotels or guest houses

Two primary schools

Two community halls,a healthcentre and library

82.5hectares of green space

At the heart of the development, he said Beyond Green would create a town centre at the intersection between an existing local through road and a new east-west route that is being created to service the site with a main square that he hoped will become a focal point for Broadland as a whole.

The rest of the development would be planned on the basis of what he described as ‘walkable neighbourhoods.

”People will never be more than a 400 m walk of being able to buy pint of milk and a paper and within 1o minutes of one of the principle centres where will be possible to do quite a lot more.

“It will be laid out on a grid, like about every Victorian and Edwardian neighbourhood in the country, which is a tried and tested model.”

He added that the development would feature no traffic lights or roundabouts, which he believed was “pretty unique for this type of development.”

Murphy said that Beyond Green was aiming to build some of the site itself but would be parcelling up the site for other developers to work on. He added that the company aimed to put Beeston Green on the map by earmarking a high proportion of these plots for self and custom-built housing , which he hoped would get the scheme moving more quickly than relying on traditional developers.

CASE STUDY – UEA OPEN TO DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS

The University of East Anglia has lots of development opportunities on its iconic Norwich campus, but lacks the cash to take them forward itself, according to its director of estates.

Roger Bond, who gave an overview of UEA’s development plans in his closing keynote presentation at BEN’s Norwich seminar, said that the university’s 50-year old infrastructure required substantial annual expenditure to keep it up to scratch.

However, funding restrictions on the higher education sector restricted the university’s ability to carry out projects to refurbish or replace existing facilities in order to meet the pressure of a growing student population.

“We’ve got lots of opportunities but not an awful lot of cash,” he said.

As an example, he namechecked UEA’s plans to expand its parking facilities by building a multiple-decked facility

“Staff and students would love to see decked car park but con that it’s not the best use of scarce resources so we are looking for a third-party funder,” he said, identifying student accommodation as another area where the university was exploring collaboration with external partners.

He also said that UEA was close to submitting funding bids for a number of developments on campus, including a new data centre, which would be carried out in collaboration with Hewlett Packard and Aviva and a new STEMM building, the outcome of which it hoped to know by the end of this year.