Linmere

Open gallery (3)

Linmere is a new sustainable urban extension to Houghton Regis, Bedfordshire. Over the next 15 years, around 5,000 homes will be built in a series of interconnected neighbourhoods, each with a distinctive local identity, set in well-landscaped strategic open space, a pedestrian and cycle network, and with provision for Local Centres and Schools.

Place Services' Urban Design team, acting for Central Bedfordshire Council, has provided development advice and liaised with the Linmere team, including Stantec (the masterplanners), to help ensure the outline application, site wide design code, area design codes, and reserved matters applications for each of the phases are of high design quality. This includes working with Planning, Highways and Landscape Officers, Stantec, and the Linmere development team to ensure each neighbourhood has its own character, has clear, attractive, legible architecture, is contextual, well-landscaped, well-connected, and has strongly defined public spaces.

Sustainability runs through this masterplan, from ensuring active travel, ecology and sustainable drainage is supported, to providing elements of off-site construction, renewable energy, and green roofs. After commenting on the Design Codes, we have collaborated with the team to flexibly apply these to each phase to ensure the principles run like a golden thread through the development.

The first homes have already been built and residents have moved in, creating an exciting new collection of communities in leafy, walkable neighbourhoods.