Few things are more gratifying than seeing a scheme built out and knowing the design held. At West Durrington, not only does the detailed layout closely reflect the aspirations of the masterplan, the street names do too. Confirmation that what CSA’s urban designers and landscape architects formulated has become a commercially viable, attractive place where a real community has taken root.
CSA first became involved at West Durrington in 2010, following two earlier unsuccessful planning applications. The brief was to produce a masterplan informed by a detailed landscape and heritage appraisal, with particular attention to the site’s sensitive context – adjoining the South Downs National Park, an area of Ancient Woodland, and the Goring Conservation Area.
The project came with a fair share of challenges: respecting the setting of the National Park, responding to the nearby Site of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC) (which required refining the original proposals), and carefully knitting the development into the existing built fabric. The landscape appraisal formed the basis of an ES Chapter, from which CSA developed a masterplan for 700 dwellings, a primary school and recreational open space. Outline planning permission was granted in April 2012, after which CSA prepared the detailed design of the landscape infrastructure.
Following the success of the consented scheme, CSA were retained by the consortium to bring forward a further application for 240 dwellings on land to the north. That site bordered the National Park on two of its four boundaries, a Conservation Area to the west, and several listed buildings to the north. Following extensive discussions with the Park Authority and the LPA, outline planning consent was granted in December 2019.
Together, the two phases deliver nearly 1,000 homes and a series of well-connected open spaces, including a large central green that acts as a focal point for the neighbourhood. The scheme is now largely built out and it is rewarding to see the design principles established at masterplan and landscape stages carried through to the ground.
A recent site visit brought that home. The central garden, with its timber flowering rose pergolas, is exactly the kind of space the masterplan envisaged: somewhere people actually use and linger in. The sustainable urban drainage (SuDS) pond, now well-vegetated with reed and marginal planting, sits comfortably within the neighbourhood rather than reading as purely functional infrastructure.
West Durrington is a good example of what joined-up thinking can produce when those disciplines sit within the same team, fewer handoffs, better communication, and a design thread that runs consistently from the earliest appraisal work through to what is now built and occupied.
