South-East Faversham

The Duchy of Cornwall, best known for its pioneering, sustainable developments at Poundbury and at Nansledan, owns a significant landholding to the south of the historic town of Faversham, in Kent.

With Kim Wilkie, with whom we work regularly, we have been masterplanning a new settlement on this site which will create a powerful new vision of what truly sustainable development means today – starting from the earth up.  Kim and our studio have developed a masterplan philosophy around soil, water and local patterns of human relationship with the land.  A network of avenues, orchards, allotments, meadows and wooded rides will link the built form together in a beautiful, gently-gridded plan of tree-lined streets. At the heart of the development is a large public urban square that will contain the Cricket Club.

The masterplan allows for a rich mix of houses, commercial buildings, shops, cafes, schools and other buildings and will contain a significant proportion of affordable housing provision. All buildings have been designed with best practice sustainable performance in mind, both in terms of building fabric, energy use, storage and generation, water consumption and treatment of sewage using highly innovative systems.

We have spent time and great care studying local patterns of development in Faversham and Swale, in order to inform our approach not only to local patterns of landscape development but also to buildings and materials.  As a practice we passionately believe that the best solutions to contemporary problems can often be found using the wisdom of tradition and extremely local building forms, adapted for the best of life today and in the future.

Download the Faversham Characterisation Study.

Fawley Waterside

Fawley Waterside represents one of the most extraordinary sites in the south of England, located on the edge of Southampton Water and the Solent, on the site of the former Fawley Power Station.

Working initially with Leon Krier as masterplanner, and with Kim Wilkie the landscape architect, we developed a proposal over many years for a vibrant new ‘merchant city’ at this spectacular location which will combine marine industries with a high-density urban fabric mixing apartments and townhouses.  Outline planning approval has been granted and work is ongoing to bring forward the first phases of development over the course of 2023-24.

Poundbury

Over two decades now, our practice has designed houses and buildings in Poundbury for the Duchy of Cornwall. Poundbury, the experimental urban extension to Dorchester envisioned by the former Prince of Wales in the 1980s, and masterplanned by Leon Krier, brings to fruition the most significant delivered new urbanist development seen in Europe. Internationally renowned for its creation of mixed-use, walkable streets, with a significant proportion of affordable housing, Poundbury could be considered perhaps the most influential housing project in the United Kingdom since the Second World War.

Our work in Poundbury began in the late 1990s, when, as a student at the Prince’s Institute for Architecture, Ben won a small limited competition to design the first phase of Pummery Square.  Five years later, we designed Woodlands Crescent, and then in 2012 work started on the South East Quadrant.  Since that date, the practice has designed or masterplanned over 1000 houses, including Royal Pavilion which forms the focal point of Krier’s masterplan.

Our experience in Poundbury, working with the Duchy and with Leon Krier, puts us at the heart of the new urbanist planning movement and from here we have gone on to design several other major schemes, including the Tornagrain New Town in the Highlands, South-East Faversham, for the Duchy of Cornwall, in Kent, and Welborne, in Hampshire.  Large scale masterplanning remains a fundamental part of our practice’s work, as it has been from the first, and we love applying the lessons of Poundbury and these other projects on a wider and wider scale – improving the built environment of the British Isles and leaving, hopefully, a powerful legacy over the decades.