Proctor and Matthews have gained planning consent for 306 sustainable new homes as part of a major new housing and mixed use community near Cambridge. Designed for Countryside Properties on the former Clay Farm site at Great Kneighton, the project is part of an overall development that will eventually provide up to 2,250 new homes, extensive strategic open space, accompanying provision of education facilities, sports and recreation, health and community facilities and local shopping facilities.
Proctor and Matthews' design consists of a hierarchy of spaces and housing types to suit different parts of the development. This approach both gives form to existing infrastructure and a formal sense of arrival at the entrance to the site, before moving sequentially towards a more relaxed architectural language that is integrated with the neighbouring countryside at the edge of the development. 40% of the new homes will be affordable housing.
At the entrance to the site will be to apartment marker buildings within a formal structured court, in reference to the urban form of Cambridge colleges. Together with new landscaping, the large formal "Great Court" absorbs the existing infrastructure and provides a suitable gateway to the remainder of the scheme.
Beyond the Great Court are a series of mews streets supported by three storey courtyard saw-tooth terraced houses. The materials used here - predominantly brick - borrow from the Great Court, while the more modest and domestic scale provides a sense of transition from the arrival zone. Each house has garden space to the front with a raised courtyard terrace at the rear. A series of parallel green connecting corridors run perpendicular to the terraces, creating pleasant shared spaces between the houses. These "landscape ribbons" also provide a linear route through the development, connecting the formal landscape of the Great Court to the open countryside at the edge.
A further transition takes place at the rear of the site, where the housing typology becomes loose clusters of smaller two and three-storey units. The "Green Lanes" zone of the development seeks to create a village atmosphere, and will provide a range of two to five bedroom homes for both private and affordable tenures. Houses will sit within private walled gardens and generously-planted shared spaces. Compared with the strong urban language of the Great Court, here the aim is to achieve relaxed "rural erosion" at the boundary of the development. Here the hierarchy of spaces and buildings shrinks further, before vanishing into the natural landscape beyond.
A simple and controlled palette of materials will be used across the development. All buildings will share a base palette of "Cambridge" stock brickwork, and will be highlighted with panels of textured brick. Elsewhere materials will be used to illustrate the hierarchy of building types. The formal Great Court, for example, will be animated in places with perforated metal cladding, back-lit at night to create a "halo" around the courtyard and enhance the sense of arrival. Meanwhile, houses in the "Green Lanes" will have horizontal black boarding at first floor levels and red clay traditional tiles, referencing local vernacular buildings and providing a softer edge to the development.
Stephanie Dale, Associate and project architect at Proctor and Matthews said: "This is an important pivotal site at the southern entrance to the new neighbourhood of Great Kneighton. Our design utilises a series of residential typologies combined to create a spatial hierarchy of townhouses and apartments from the "Great Court" to the family houses of the "eroded" rural edge. This project offers the unique opportunity to creat a formal residential space on the scale of the great Georgian squares of the 18th century."
Tony Travers, Managing Director of New Homes and Communities division at Countryside Properties said:
"We are very pleased to be working with Proctor and Matthews again and have a good track record of producing innovative homes using their designs. This is a high quality design derived from a great concept and it sits comfortably in parallele with our Glebe Farm site next door, which has been designed by our in-house architectural team. With this second site we will be well on our way to building a new community at Great Kneighton. Work on site is expected to start in the Autumn."
