Bromley Common (852 Homes)

Masterplanning in the Green Belt... As you drive into Bromley along the A22, on the right there just before Bromley South, there were some old disused playing fields, allotments, shopping trolleys and mattresses. 14Ha of prime Green Belt apparently!.... although really just land without much use, degraded, disconnected from the wider countryside by a major road and a couple of post-war estates. And a protracted Planning debate over its future.

We were asked late in 2007 for some sketches to inform an Outline Application, just to establish numbers (850-odd units), but Officers weren’t convinced that it could really be designed successfully to achieve such numbers; what with the constraints of noise, important views, watercourses, providing a bus interchange, allotments, keeping the mature trees, concerns regarding overlooking (11 storeys on the boundary!), etc. It looked as though the big issue, the principle of the effective re-use of this Green Belt land, was going to be drowned under a mass of lesser detailed concerns over parking and just the right colour of render.

We said, let’s cut through all of that and make sure there can’t possibly be any objections over design: and we walked the streets and put together a thorough character appraisal, and then worked up a comprehensive Design Code and Masterplan. And it worked. The Inquiry dismissed any design objections and concentrated on the single issue, Green Belt.