Queen Elizabeth Barracks, Church Crookham (865 Homes)

Making it work... For TEN YEARS, our Client had owned this site: brought forward by their Strategic arm, they’d pursued it all the way through the Planning System and ended up with a dismissal at Appeal. So, a new start, and a new Architectural Consultant brimming with brilliant ideas and design flair (I’m referring to ourselves here) - a new masterplan for 850+ units, a new approach to the townscape and to the architecture. The result: consent at local level. Job done!

Well - perhaps it wasn’t quite so easy. There were significant constraints on the site, many of which had acronyms: SANGS, SINCs, TPOs, APC (valued at £4m+!), CAA PSZ (this is a new one - the Civil Aviation Authority’s Public Safety ‘crash’ Zone which cuts through the site), bats (that’s not an acronym it’s a Chiropteran), flooding, not to mention the site being on the side of a hill... The Local Authority required a new primary school, plus retail, commercial, community and sports facilities to specified land areas, with whatever was left over allowed to be residential… As long as we did not encroach onto the land outside the settlement boundary or into RPZs (will the acronyms ever end!!)