Place Services Collaboration Day (April 2025)
Posted: 30 April 2025
How can we ensure a multidisciplinary offer? By sharing our collective built, historic and natural environment expertise with each other on a collaboration day!
We’ve put together a short summary video of a sunny spring day in Saffron Walden, where we identified heritage assets and assessed the historic character of the town centre, took a guided tour of the award-winning development The Avenue, and had a go at a tree and ecological survey on the banks of The River Slade.
- The Built Environment team led a tour of The Avenue, showcasing a contemporary, award winning development with excellent examples of urban design and landscape considerations, set within an established avenue of trees in the former grounds of Friends School – a Victorian setting
- For our Historic Environment session we took a tour of Saffron Walden’s historic town centre. Using the character assessment toolkit, team members from across all disciplines at Place Services tried their hand at identifying the special character of various parts of the town. Along the way we pointed out examples of heritage assets, including many fine medieval buildings, the largest parish church in Essex, and the archaeological remains of Walden Castle.
- The Natural Environment session focused on a guided walk around The Slade - a modest tributary of the River Cam which flows to the west of Saffron Walden. The Arboriculture team demonstrated survey techniques used when conducting tree assessments, and the Ecology team simulated an ecological constraints assessment. Thankfully, no wellies were required!
A big thank you to our team of Principals, Teresa Borsuk and Alexis Butterfield of Pollard Thomas Edwards, and the Practice Management Team for facilitating an excellent and valuable team day!