Shropshire Star

80,000-home garden city vision for Shrewsbury fails to take root

An idea for Shrewsbury to be transformed into a garden city is "unrealistic" say council experts.

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The town was among 40 listed in a plan by David Rudlin to solve the housing crisis by expanding into the green belt.

Mr Rudlin won the Wolfson Prize, the second biggest economics accolade in the world after the Nobel Prize, along with £250,000 for his idea.

But Shropshire Council experts dismissed the idea for 80,000 homes over 35 years as taking no account of local circumstances.

And the housing minister, Brandon Lewis, condemned the scheme as "urban sprawl" that would build nothing other than "resentment" among local people and said the Government would have nothing to do with it.

David Rudlin idea is to double the size of existing towns and cities, including Shrewsbury, by building more than 80,000 homes in "garden cities" in the green belt.

But Shropshire Council has immediately jettisoned the idea, saying it takes no account of local circumstances.

The Government almost immediately trashed the call to build 3.5 million homes by expanding 40 towns and cities based on Rudlin's imaginary city, Uxcester.

It cited planning issues – but would also have taken into account just how unpopular the prospect of huge new developments would be with voters less than a year before a general election.

Shrewsbury is included in a long list of towns with potential to expand into garden cities. They also include the likes of Oxford, Bath, Stafford and Chester.

Andy Mortimer, policy and environment manager at Shropshire Council insisted today: "The council has no plans for Shrewsbury to become a garden city in the near future, and is planning through our SAMDev document for approx 4,700 new houses for Shrewsbury in the next 14 years. This is about 335 per year.

"The 80,000 new houses quoted over 35 years would be around 2,285 houses per year.

"Clearly this is unrealistic and takes no account of local circumstances and seems to be a 'catch-all' figure applied to all the towns in the list, some of which vary greatly in size and population."

Housing minister Brandon Lewis also condemned the scheme as "urban sprawl" that would build nothing other than "resentment" among local people and said the Government would have nothing to do with it.

The idea of garden cities is for homes scattered between parks and public gardens.

Welwyn Garden City was built soon after the First World War, according to the vision of Sir Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City movement.

Howard planned "a town designed for healthy living" where people could live, work and raise their families away from the miseries of congested cities.

It, and similar towns like Letchworth, have been used ever since as a model of how a garden city can provide a solution to Britain's rising population.

People coming to these towns were told they would enjoy working and living within easy reach of the countryside and have their own gardens and open spaces.

These ideas later inspired the 1946 New Towns Act and the towns that followed.

Today the population is over 42,000 and Howard's name lives on with the main town centre thoroughfare named Howardsgate and the modern indoor shopping complex The Howard Centre.

Great attention has always been paid to landscaping, with residential and commercial areas laid out along tree lined roads.

The neo-Georgian style town centre has a large department store and many branches of major chain stores are located in and around the Howard Centre which opened in 1990.

The town has developed into a thriving international business centre where many influential companies enjoy the advantages of a quality location.

Parkway in the town centre is the jewel in the crown with its famous fountain built for the Queen's Coronation in 1953, majestic close cut lawns and colourful embroideries of flowers.

Maurice de Soissons in his definitive history of Welwyn Garden City 'A Town Designed for Healthy Living' said "To walk in the Garden City today is as always the best way to appreciate it."

Part of Telford's Southwater development

Garden cities should be familiar to people in Shropshire – they only need to look at Telford.

It isn't a city, of course, but many of the concepts that are integral to garden cities are incorporated into the town we now know as a bustling centre to live and work. Telford was in fact going to be called Wrekin Forest City at one point. Another suggestion was Dawelloak.

Landscape and green space has always been at the heart of the vision for Telford New Town. The description of Telford as the "Forest City" was first established by the Telford Development Corporation.

Today the green spaces and natural features provide a landscape context which development can fit into.

When the new town of Telford was created in the 1960s, its designers imagined a landscape veined with woodland, parks and green spaces.

This vision for a "green network" was made real through the planting of around six million trees and 10 million shrubs.

The green network links up with the surrounding countryside, including The Wrekin and Ercall hills and the thickly wooded River Severn valley.

Today, Telford's population is growing towards 200,000; larger than that of Oxford, but new development is also seen as vital to the town's thriving economy.

The new Southwater development sits alongside the Town Park and incorporates a lake. It is a soft landscape to take visitors into the town's main shopping centre.

And many believe that expansion is good for Telford. Owen Batham, of Elite Precast Concrete, who is also an ambassador for the Meet Telford & Shropshire campaign aimed at driving inward investment to the town, said he thought Telford should aggressively campaign to become a city.

He added: "Being a city would give it a bit more identity, and we would be very supportive of that."

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