JTP is thrilled to announce that Lancaster City Council’s Cabinet has endorsed the Spatial Masterplan Framework and Vision Document as the basis for delivering the new community at Bailrigg Garden Village as part of the preparation of the Lancaster South Area Action Plan.
JTP was appointed by Lancaster City Council to undertake a two stage masterplanning process to develop a community, landscape and placemaking-led masterplan for the new Garden Village, working alongside landscape architect, Farrer Huxley and engineering consultancy, Expedition.
Selected as one of fourteen new settlements by the Government in a first ‘wave’ of Garden Villages across England, Bailrigg Garden Village will deliver approximately 5,000 mixed-tenure homes alongside green spaces and a mixed-use local centre including a convenience store, retail spaces, primary school, community, workshop and flexible commercial spaces clustered around the high street. The Vision Masterplan also looked beyond the current plan period and planned how further housing need could evolve from the garden village beyond 2030.
Rooted in a landscape-led approach, the masterplan considers and accommodates all of the site's natural assets, with over 69% of the site designated for green infrastructure, including grazing land, woodlands and parks.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, JTP engaged extensively with local organisations, stakeholders and communities in a collaborative process to shape and design the Garden Village. A staged process of community engagement provided a variety of ways for the community to feed into the preparation of the masterplan including a face-to-face stakeholder charrette, a digital “Create Communities” platform and online community workshops.
The masterplan Vision promotes a move for the site from mainly monoculture farming to a more diverse permaculture landscape to encourage a self-sustaining lifestyle. This will aim to improve the health of the soil, increasing organic matter and organisms and avoid loss of carbon, and create a good management model to re-use farm and resident waste for fertiliser/soil improvements.
Settlements will be designed to sit sensitively within the existing drumlin landscape, with building orientations and homes arranged around natural features, including the canal and woodland, as well as the site’s changing topography.
A network of active and leisure cycling and walking routes will connect the Garden Village to surrounding settlements, Lancaster City Centre, Glasson Dock, Galgate and Lancaster University developing productive and collaborative relationships between all partners.
A range of mosaic landscapes and local food production will support the new village. The introduction of a variety of landscape ‘layers’ across the site include a new mixed woodland that reconnects existing woodland; open access grazing grassland for livestock to make produce for, example milk, for local supply and provide local employment; a network of productive landscapes including small scale horticultural enterprises and open field production; as well as more traditional community gardens and allotments, agroforestry and orchards.
These layers will be developed further to see how they apply at each scale of the masterplan, from macro (strategic landscape) to micro (honey production on roofs), forming an integrated network in which people and nature thrive together.
Under the framework, Bailrigg Garden Village would feature energy and resource-efficient buildings, all of which will aim to achieve zero-waste in both operation and development. Solar farms and wind farms are to be introduced to offset carbon emissions and help the new community to have access to clean, renewable energy. The masterplan also incorporates plants and vegetation that can capture and store carbon dioxide. Using a mixture of renewable energy farms and landscape sequestering is predicted to ensure that 75% of the whole life carbon emissions caused by the new homes can be offset.
The next step for Bailrigg Garden Village is for Lancaster City Council to use the masterplan framework to create the Lancaster South Area Action Plan, which it hopes to be adopted in 2023.
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