Aylesbury Vale District Council have resolved to grant planning permission for a new mixed use neighbourhood at South West Milton Keynes.

Complimenting the City’s ambition for growth, the project delivers up to 1,855 new homes, a neighbourhood centre (accommodating local shopping and community facilities), a primary and secondary school, an employment area and over 53 hectares of green infrastructure.

Appointed by a consortium of land developers and house builders (Hallam Land Management, Taylor Wimpey, Connolly Homes, William Davis Homes and Bellcross Homes), FPCR have provided comprehensive landscape, ecological, arboricultural and masterplanning services for this project over a number of years. This has included extensive ecological surveys for protected species, arboricultural assessments and veteran tree surveys, a Landscape & Visual Impact Assessment and a Green Infrastructure (GI) Strategy.

Through the GI Strategy, FPCR have led the development of a series of sensitive environmental design solutions. This includes addressing the scheme’s setting with surrounding established communities, and providing the conservation and enhancement of key landscape features. Applying FPCR’s core ethos of a ‘ground up’ approach to design, the GI strategy ensures that features of particular value, such as the site’s mature trees and hedgerows and the existing public rights, to include Milton Keynes Boundary Walk, are sensitively protected and strengthened as part of the design. Expanding this framework, the GI strategy delivers a connected series of habitats across the neighbourhood with new woodland, hedges, grassland meadows and ponds, and extensive areas of accessible greenspace in the form of new sports pitches, community parks, allotments and recreational routes. The GI underpins the design of the new neighbourhood.