East Devon New Town

East Devon has had experience with delivering a new town, Cranbrook, and it has been essential to learn from local experience as well as other large settlements that are being developed across the country.

Having engaged with Councillors, officers, stakeholders and the community key cornerstones of the visions are:

• A self-sufficient, healthy and dynamic community, ensuring infrastructure is delivered early, centres can be phased, and facilities and services are appropriately scaled to create a vibrant new community.
• An ambitious and highly desirable place, where people choose to life and stay.
• Promote innovative design to create a place that looks towards the future and incorporates the best possible, while drawing inspiration from the local context, including the unique surrounding historic environment, to create a rich character.
• A place embedded in a well-connected and integrated active travel network (walking and cycling) with comprehensive links to nearby employment, surrounding countryside and the city of Exeter.
• A community underpinned at its core by sustainability, wellbeing, and healthy living, creating an exemplar zero-carbon town both in terms of self-sufficiency.
• Seamlessly integrated with the outstanding East Devon natural environment and provide a rich network of substantial open space.
• Last, but not least an adaptable new settlement will preserve East Devon’s legacy as an outstanding place to live.

Currently concept masterplans are explored through stakeholder and public engagement. These are based on technical assessments by the team, delivery considerations and the ambition to turn the vision statement into reality.

The concept is shaped by the existing landscape setting with three neighbourhoods set around the river valley, turning this into an extension to the Clyst Valley Regional Park and natural asset for the future community. The emerging open space strategy looks to deliver opportunity for activity for all sections of the new community including, children, the elderly and less able. Wildlife, biodiversity, alternative green space and the protection of Ancient Woodland all form part of the picture.

Each neighbourhood has its own is accessible centre with day-to-day facilities and schools within easy walking and cycle distance to homes. A larger centre provides the town wide facilities and would be connected to employment uses to provide a facility for all and ensure footfall particular in the early phases of development. Learning lessons from our work at Northstowe and Otterpool Park, centres are located, with phasing considerations in mind, so that they can deliver facilities early without being undermined by a lack of footfall and an established community.

Park & Ride facilities and bus priority links are being explored through the options to ensure the town promotes sustainable transport connectivity.

Ground mounted photovoltaics, micro grids and heat recovery are options explored by the team to serve the settlement with energy. Wastewater Treatment Works, recycling plants are part of the mix to serve the wide region with much needed facilities.

Following the engagement, we will continue to engage with stakeholders and develop the concept options into a preferred masterplan to support the Regulation 19 engagement of the local plan and inform the delivery strategy for this new settlement.