‘We have to move’: historic village of Tempsford reels from plan to swell its 600 residents to 350,000
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/26/first-came-the-romans-then-the-danes-now-the-housebuilders-are-coming-for-tempsford-rural-bedfordshire?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-5
Posted by BestButtons
10 Comments
Some developer rubbing his hands at being able to dig up forests and countryside on the cheap instead of having to redevelope grey sites.
Interesting story and something I believe we are going to see more of.
> Then, last month, the government confirmed plans to make it the site of a new railway station, where the planned East West Rail linking the university cities will meet the East Coast mainline from London.
> Tempsford could be an appealing commuter base for workers in any of those cities, but some see more potential still. As Labour came to power pledging 1.5 million new homes, a report from UK Day One urged that they should be built as new towns. And there was one obvious location.
This is interesting, I didn’t know it is a possibility, but may well be the way to finance these developments:
> The case for Tempsford improves further, the UK Day One report said, with a tax or other mechanism to claim some of the massive uplift in land value for the state.
> “The agricultural price per hectare is about £35,000,” Emerson said. “Once you get planning permission you are looking at £3m per hectare. The government should be capturing a significant chunk of that – it’s kind of free money.”
> Emerson’s co-author, Samuel Hughes, is an editor at Works in Progress magazine. He said this money could finance long-desired upgrades to the East Coast main line: expanding the King’s Cross terminus and relieving the bottleneck at Welwyn – where four tracks become two, forcing high-speed and stopping services on to the same lines.
> “The two big questions are over land value capture and scale,” Hughes said. “Is it 10,000 or 100,000 dwellings?” After visiting the village, he still favours the latter.
I hope the government will take full advantage of this.
Maybe this could be the development that finally gets the Black Cat Roundabout deleted in favour of a grade-separated junction.
lolno, never mind me, of course it won’t.
Never going to happen.
The A1 at that stretch is gridlock now. I’ve needed to drive that way into London many times.
You’d need to expand the A1 from 4 to about 8 lanes. So where is Beeston going? The roundabouts surrounded by houses? There’s a river too and the entire area floods badly.
And where’s the road going to narrow? Stevenage area is gridlocked in the morning already. So, an 8 lane motorway from St Neots to London Orbital?
So, £1trn?
Would never trust moving into a new-build city, infrastructure would simply be insufficient for future needs.
All development that came before – Foreordained, necessary, as it should be.
All future development – WHAT? No, never! Nothing should be developed, ever!
People sitting in their homes, that were probably built at the same time as a thousand other homes within a square mile that all look exactly the same and people complained about them at the time, really do have no sense of perspective. People need housing. Pulling up the ladder because you got yours and screw anyone else is really short sighted and the way revolutions happen (not the nice kind of revolutions for the already-haves, fwiw).
This sort of development is the only way we are going to make significant progress in the housing crisis. Pissing about building the odd estate of 1000 houses here and there will make no real difference.
We need new towns, and we need to build them in the right places. There needs to be enough space around to build tens of thousands of houses, but there also need to be good transport links so people can commute to work as the new town establishes itself.
It is a challenge. They need to build houses, build infrastructure, attract employers to the new town, and attract people to come and live there. All those things need each other, so growth needs to be carefully planned. If you build 10,000 houses in the middle of nowhere but with no jobs or transport links, nobody is going to live there. If nobody lives there, no employers are going set up there. It is a complex chicken and egg situation.
So sad. Village life is being destroyed all over the country and our green belt is disappearing. Happy they want to build more houses, but it should be done only on brown field sites before green belt can even be considered.
Yeah lets build more homes on green land. Who needs food anyway
Let me guess, they freaked out because they want to build 20 homes.