\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>his is \u2013 they tell you in Tempsford \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Before Rachel Reeves announced plans to accelerate a \u201cgrowth arc\u201d between Oxford and Cambridge, the name of this tiny Bedfordshire village was likely unknown to most.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cThere had been talk of 10,000 or 20,000 houses, then out of nowhere came this 350,000 [people] figure.\u201d<\/p>\n He said local reaction ranged \u201cfrom apathy, saying, \u2018well, nothing\u2019s happened yet,\u2019 to \u2018we have to move away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 if you can ignore the sound of the A1, tucked out of sight behind strategically placed trees \u2013 the rural England vibes are strong.<\/p>\n Sutton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/span>David Sutton is the chair of the parish council and landlord of the Wheatsheaf in Tempsford.<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an element of being the only traditional pub in a city of hundreds of thousands of people that isn\u2019t all bad,\u201d Sutton said. \u201cMilton Keynes shows how it could be done. But it isn\u2019t pretty.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI used to look out of my windows and see fields,\u201d she said. \u201cThen I watched the road and houses grow up … All this rural land disappeared.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just doesn\u2019t make any sense \u2013 it\u2019s just taking away the beauty of a rural area. The amount of stress it puts on the whole community is mad.\u201d<\/p>\n Roxton residents have just lost a planning appeal to stop a development that was admitted to be environmentally damaging. \u201cBut that didn\u2019t outweigh the benefits of new housing,\u201d said Deborah Jackson, a Wheatsheaf regular. \u201cIf a council hasn\u2019t met its housing need, then the planners can ride roughshod over the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u00a31bn investment by National Highways, this will complete the dual carriageway between Milton Keynes and Cambridge.<\/p>\n <\/span>Tempsford resident Fiona Nicholl.<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cIt seemed like the perfect location,\u201d said Kane Emerson, one of the UK Day One report\u2019s two authors. \u201cWe were motivated by our strong feeling that new homes should be well located for transport.\u201d<\/p>\n Emerson, who is also the head of housing at the Yimby Alliance (\u201cYes, in my back yard\u201d), added: \u201cThe government speaks a lot about economic growth \u2013 and if you look at where homes will deliver the most growth, it\u2019s near where the average earnings to house price ratio is at its highest \u2013 essentially those places with really good opportunities such as Oxford, Cambridge and London.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe agricultural price per hectare is about \u00a335,000,\u201d Emerson said. \u201cOnce you get planning permission you are looking at \u00a33m per hectare. The government should be capturing a significant chunk of that \u2013 it\u2019s kind of free money.\u201d<\/p>\n Emerson\u2019s 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\u2019s Cross terminus and relieving the bottleneck at Welwyn \u2013 where four tracks become two, forcing high-speed and stopping services on to the same lines.<\/p>\n \u201cThe two big questions are over land value capture and scale,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cIs it 10,000 or 100,000 dwellings?\u201d After visiting the village, he still favours the latter.<\/p>\n \u201cThe residents were remarkably polite to me, all things considered,\u201d he said. \u201cUnfortunately, there is an overwhelming case for building at Tempsford.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Trains speed through Tempsford on the route between London and Edinburgh, but have not stopped in the village since 1956. <\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Steve Chambers is the director of the charity Transport for New Homes. He has visited plenty of housing developments that don\u2019t work. \u201cWe term them cowpat estates \u2013 plonked in the fields,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery single trip they generate is in the car, in the vast majority of cases. If it\u2019s remote, it needs to be big enough to support amenities \u2013 you\u2019re talking about tens of thousands of homes.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat 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 \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cI remember as a lad going down the A1, through this village that was cut in two, thinking that\u2019s a weird place.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, it is a weird place. But I love it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But across the A1, he reckoned, 20,000 homes were a given. How did that make him feel? \u201cIt\u2019s progress,\u201d he said, sombrely, before brightening: \u201cI\u2019ll be in there,\u201d he added, pointing to the nearby graveyard, \u201clong before it happens\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is \u2013 they tell you in Tempsford \u2013 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1022,1264,1294,1436,5924,5104,5925,5923,5922],"class_list":{"0":"post-12348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-historic","9":"tag-housing","10":"tag-move","11":"tag-plan","12":"tag-reels","13":"tag-residents","14":"tag-swell","15":"tag-tempsford","16":"tag-village"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}