COMMITTED AND INTELLIGENT MASTER PLANNING
SETTING OUT A VISION THAT BRING AUTHORITIES AND LOCAL COUNCILS TOGETHER – THREE MARKET TOWNS IN HUNTINGDONSHIRE, UK
The three market towns of Huntingdon, St Ives and Ramsey, north of Cambridge, needed a broader and more ambitious vision for a future post-Covid pandemic. URBAN Silence supported GHD in exploring recent trends using cutting edge ‘mass data’ and working with the three Town Council to identify a brief for their own future.
Three tailored Vision Statement and Economic Evidence papers were prepared in a very short period of time to bring together the District and Town Councils and agree a common agenda for further work and eventual preparation of an investment programme. The challenges were in:
- Going under the skin of recent trends, accelerated during the Covid pandemic, and understanding how these have the potential to reposition the towns in the near future.
- Expanding ambitions while adopting local perspectives, reflecting community capacity and circumstances.
- Capturing the individuality of each town and the synergies between them.
- Creating a direct link between local aspirations (expressed and understood by the community) and actionable, technical topics paving the way for further study (what officers in the District needed to see).
The outcome was three individually tailored and ambitious Vision Statements that stretch the imagination of the local Town Councils and have the support of the District Council, because backed up by dialogue and clever analysis by lead consultant GHD Advisory of very recent data, including patterns of spending at a fairly fine grain during the various stages of the pandemic in 2020-21.
