This is – they tell you in Tempsford – where Boudicca rallied against the Romans. Where the early English kings fought off the Danes and where Churchill launched secret flights to aid resistance fighters keeping the Nazis at bay.
But the historic earthworks, wheatfields and RAF base of Tempsford may yet prove no match for a chancellor bent on housebuilding and growth, armed with thinktank reports and a 10-year infrastructure strategy.
Before Rachel Reeves announced plans to accelerate a “growth arc” between Oxford and Cambridge, the name of this tiny Bedfordshire village was likely unknown to most.
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.
A map showing Tempsford on the as-yet-unfinished train line between Oxford and Cambridge, at the point where it intersects with the line to London
It was, said David Sutton, the chair of the parish council and landlord of the village pub, quite a moment when the 600 residents of Tempsford learned of plans to swell their ranks to 350,000 people.
A previous local Bedfordshire plan had identified possible development opportunities, and the county has seen plenty of fields give way to housing estates, solar farms and wind turbines. But, Sutton said: “There had been talk of 10,000 or 20,000 houses, then out of nowhere came this 350,000 [people] figure.”
He said local reaction ranged “from apathy, saying, ‘well, nothing’s happened yet,’ to ‘we have to move away.’”
The post-war new towns of Stevenage and Welwyn, and the success story of the 1960s wave, Milton Keynes, are all relatively nearby. But as they thrived, Tempsford saw its century-old station axed in the Beeching cuts, and the expanded A1 road cut the settlement in two.
On the east side of this division is Station Road, ending in a level crossing where East Coast main line trains whizz between London and Edinburgh. To the west is the pub, various Tudor buildings and the church. Union jacks fly over centuries-old thatched cottages and – if you can ignore the sound of the A1, tucked out of sight behind strategically placed trees – the rural England vibes are strong.
Sutton’s pub, the Wheatsheaf, reopened last year, and claims a history dating back at least as far as a coaching house on the site in the early 16th century.
David Sutton is the chair of the parish council and landlord of the Wheatsheaf in Tempsford. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
“There’s an element of being the only traditional pub in a city of hundreds of thousands of people that isn’t all bad,” Sutton said. “Milton Keynes shows how it could be done. But it isn’t pretty.”
The neighbouring village, Roxton, is already seeing development and could be swallowed up by the new town. Behind the bar of the Wheatsheaf, Fiona Nicholl said she recently sold her home in Roxton to move to Tempsford. “I used to look out of my windows and see fields,” she said. “Then I watched the road and houses grow up … All this rural land disappeared.
“It just doesn’t make any sense – it’s just taking away the beauty of a rural area. The amount of stress it puts on the whole community is mad.”
Roxton residents have just lost a planning appeal to stop a development that was admitted to be environmentally damaging. “But that didn’t outweigh the benefits of new housing,” said Deborah Jackson, a Wheatsheaf regular. “If a council hasn’t met its housing need, then the planners can ride roughshod over the rest.”
It is very much the direction of travel, as the new Labour government has signalled, to favour the builders over the blockers. And Tempsford, unlike many new developments, will at least be well connected. As well as the promised new train station, work is underway to reshape the nearby Black Cat roundabout. Part of a £1bn investment by National Highways, this will complete the dual carriageway between Milton Keynes and Cambridge.
Tempsford resident Fiona Nicholl. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
“It seemed like the perfect location,” said Kane Emerson, one of the UK Day One report’s two authors. “We were motivated by our strong feeling that new homes should be well located for transport.”
Emerson, who is also the head of housing at the Yimby Alliance (“Yes, in my back yard”), added: “The government speaks a lot about economic growth – and if you look at where homes will deliver the most growth, it’s near where the average earnings to house price ratio is at its highest – essentially those places with really good opportunities such as Oxford, Cambridge and London.”
Developers had already spotted the potential. About 850 hectares (2,100 acres) of the land around Tempsford is optioned by Urban&Civic, a developer owned by the Wellcome Trust.
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.
“The residents were remarkably polite to me, all things considered,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is an overwhelming case for building at Tempsford.”
Trains speed through Tempsford on the route between London and Edinburgh, but have not stopped in the village since 1956. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
The future for Tempsford may well depend on the government-commissioned new towns taskforce, which is due to report in September. But others concur that going big beats small, scattered areas of new homes.
Steve Chambers is the director of the charity Transport for New Homes. He has visited plenty of housing developments that don’t work. “We term them cowpat estates – plonked in the fields,” he said. “Every single trip they generate is in the car, in the vast majority of cases. If it’s remote, it needs to be big enough to support amenities – you’re talking about tens of thousands of homes.
“What we like about the new towns plan is the scale. They really do have the potential because they can support having a high street, a bus service … And Tempsford on those two rail lines will effectively be a transport node. But it has to be built at scale if it is to be successful.”
Massive urban development still feels a long way away in the Wheatsheaf, where a tank of racing snails takes pride of place. Looking across the road, over fields that lead to the river Ouse, and his own Tudor house, Sutton said: “I remember as a lad going down the A1, through this village that was cut in two, thinking that’s a weird place.
“Yes, it is a weird place. But I love it.”
A neighbour pulled up, and wound down the window of his electric Porsche. He was sceptical that widespread housing could come to this side of the village, having previously put sandbags out to protect his own home from the flooding river.
But across the A1, he reckoned, 20,000 homes were a given. How did that make him feel? “It’s progress,” he said, sombrely, before brightening: “I’ll be in there,” he added, pointing to the nearby graveyard, “long before it happens”.
