We need to talk about housebuilding. Lots of things I would rather talk about, but October brings it up on the agenda. Firstly, four years after the 2011-2031 Local Development Framework (LDF) was adopted by our District Council re-zoning our agricultural fields between the western edge of New Knebworth and the motorway for residential development, we are finally able to start putting forward planning applications. Delays begot delays. In the same month the LDF was finally adopted our longtime housebuilding partners were subsumed by a much larger company, much less appropriate for Knebworth. It has taken us until this summer to extract ourselves from that arrangement and to enter into a much more suitable new partnership with a housebuilder (HarperCrewe) that is in tune with our aspirations and the work that has gone on over the last 30 years on these plans. Better still, we are now working with nationally-renowned architects and designers Adam Architecture, who have a complete understanding of, and appreciation for, the original designer of New Knebworth, Edwin Lutyens.
Also this October, consultations begin on potential new sites for residential re-zoning for the next Local Development Framework, not yet titled, but likely looking at the years 2031-2051. We have put forward sites for this consultation and we understand that a natural thought will be that all we want to do is cover our agricultural fields with lucrative housing at the expense of what is best for the village. I assure you that is not the case. It is not the case for many reasons. In the space here, I’ll focus on the predominant one. Regular readers have heard me bang on for many years about replacing New Knebworth’s medieval lanes with fit-for-purpose local routes. Lutyens designed for that in 1909. The current LDF (and Local Transport Policy) make that impossible to achieve as part of the current development allocations. The new potential allocations we’ve put forward for consideration are specifically to offer an opportunity to create alternative local access routes to take traffic off – in the north west, Deards End Lane and its conservation area; in the south west, Gipsy Lane / Stockens Green, and its conservation area; and in the north east, Watton Road, for when the planned Secondary School is built. In the south east (Swangley’s Lane) we are not the landowners.
The traffic issues we face today are the direct result of New Knebworth not evolving in the way it was originally designed. Maybe we think New Knebworth was a bad idea in the first place. Maybe we think Lutyens was wrong, and New Knebworth never needed to replace these medieval lanes. Maybe we would rather not have a railway station and the pressure it brings to accommodate new homes. Maybe we are content with Highways’ vision that we will soon all be on bicycles, and therefore kettling any remaining local cars, vans, buses, lorries, down to the one crossroads in the High Street will not clog it up… If I thought any of these maybes were the case, we would not have put these new sites forward to be considered. To be sustainable, our farm needs agricultural fields. And we, like you, live here, and treasure open countryside. But if evolution and solving generational problems means development, we will support it, and accept the time it takes to do it well; to do it in the best interests of the majority; and to do it in a way that reflects the original vision for New Knebworth – or as Lutyens called it, Knebworth Garden Village.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold
