Shropshire Star

Shrewsbury self-build homes scheme set to get go-ahead

A scheme for people to build their own homes in Shrewsbury looks set to get the go-ahead next week.

Published

Shropshire Council's cabinet will be asked to release a six-hectare site on London Road at a meeting at Shirehall on Wednesday.

It is part of a new project to encourage people to design and build their own homes to meet their specific needs.

Planning and strategy manager, Adrian Cooper, said: "The principle behind it is very interesting. The government is keen to encourage planning authorities to provide people with the opportunity to build their homes home or have it built for them.

"We have several hundred people on the list in Shropshire who want to build their own home. We are seeing people are increasingly not particularly enthused about the standard of homes on offer from house builders."

The land will be a "showcase for architects", Mr Cooper said.

"It will be interesting to see how it all comes together in the end and what it looks like," he said.

"There will be some guidelines but people are pretty much free to build whatever house they like.

"If you go back far enough, that's how houses in Shrewsbury used to be built. It was the norm 20 or 30 years ago. Houses were built in ones and twos, not hundreds of the same houses at a time."

If agreed by cabinet members, 47 plots will be up for grabs to people who are on Shropshire Council's self-build list.

Nationally, there are more than one million people signed up to buy a plot of land to build the home of their dreams.

Mr Cooper said the council will also be encouraging other land owners to sell individual plots of land as opposed to selling it off as a whole to a large company.

There is potential for Shropshire Council to release other pieces of land in the future if the London Road scheme is successful, he added.