Box 8: Achieving innovative design at Graylingwell Park, Chichester

Graylingwell was a redundant hospital in 36 hectares of wooded parkland about 20 minutes walk
from the city centre. The site was taken over by the Homes and Communities Agency (then English
Partnerships) as one of 96 sites from the National Health Service and was marketed as a mixed-use
development opportunity in 2005/6. English Partnerships insisted on higher quality and more exacting
sustainability standards than the council would normally have expected, and this has since become
the benchmark for other schemes in the area.
Linden Homes took on the role as the lead joint venture partner to project manage the site
through acquisition and planning, with support from a multidisciplinary team of consultants. Originally
proposed for business development, with permission for 154 dwellings, work on the local plan led to a
Supplementary Planning Document for a number of major sites, with inputs from a local forum. The
resulting application was for a new quarter of 750 dwellings, of which 40 per cent were to be
affordable, as well as commercial and community facilities, and a care home.
The public realm is particularly extensive, with sports pitches and changing rooms, orchards
and allotments, tree planting and landscaping. A major feature is the commitment to creating the
largest zero-carbon development in the UK, with a combined heat and power (CHP) plant in the old
water tower. Approximately 150 dwellings are being carved out of the existing buildings, including the
administration building, which has already been converted into five luxury apartments.
There is access to extensive mature parkland. Footpaths connect the development to adjacent
existing neighbourhoods, with both new and existing communities encouraged to join in and use the
community development trust facilities and activities. Homes are quite spacious, typically over 100 m2.
The scheme is attracting families into the social housing, and attracting households that are
downsizing into the homes for sale. Some of these households come from outside the area. The
scheme is selling well despite the general financial situation. It is being praised by English Heritage as
one of the UKs 20 best schemes in historic places, and is winning design, community engagement
and sustainability awards.

Graylingwell Park in Chichester shows that, with imagination, it is possible to design two-storey terraced
housing that looks different, making a feature of solar panels and providing front gardens where
vegetables can be grown. Another distinctive design, in Newcastles Walker Riverside, was undertaken by
the housing association, Places for People, but needed additional grants. The resulting low-energy
housing in a Home Zone has created somewhere special. Meanwhile, the iconic apartment block called
Chips in New Islington is hard to replicate. On the whole, developments on large sites in the UK are
undertaken by volume house builders who also put in the infrastructure and use standard house types
where they know the costs and values.
Among SUNN members, there was lively consideration of whether English house buyers would
ever find contemporary designs as acceptable as neo-vernacular approaches, and discussion of the cost
implications of the different styles. Contemporary designs could be less expensive to build because less
detailing is required; modern, cost-effective materials, such as UPVC windows, can be used more
honestly. Modern designs are also more amenable to modular building techniques, although these require
contractors to have specific experience of modular methods.
Neo-vernacular design may be driven by councillors attempting to make new developments more
acceptable to their constituents, or by developers who assume this is what sells or by valuers playing
safe. Design guides may be based on an analysis of what is traditional in terms of road layout or
materials, rather than what is needed to attract home buyers as a whole. Modernistic but failed council
estates from earlier decades have harmed the reputation of contemporary design.

Designing sustainable urban neighbourhoods 29