I had the pleasure recently of being asked to join the leader of Warwick District Council, Cllr Andrew Day, on a webinar led by MPC to discuss progress of the joint Local Plan with Stratford on Avon and how the Council’s declaration of a climate emergency and the pandemic has impacted on that process, and on the future delivery of housing…a lot to cover in under an hour.

Meghan and I were sitting in a Building with Nature training course, when this opening question was posed. Casting my mind back across more years than I like to remember, the first thing that came to mind was a summer holiday club that I used to go to as a kid, set in a Nature Reserve in Birmingham.…

I’ve been working on Ebbsfleet for five years now. It started with Define helping out with some masterplanning work and it’s evolved into us being responsible for the design and detailing of all the public realm in the entire Eastern Quarry- which is roughly 14Ha of parkland and open space- the life force for the 6000 new homes to be located here as part of the NHS Health New Towns initiative. The site sits in the former Ebbsfleet Chalk Quarry, a landscape characterised by chalk cliffs and lakes, with the ever imposing silhouette of Dartford Bridge looming over everything.