Members of the Project Team discuss design options
Over the past few months bi-weekly meetings between stakeholders in the Bicclescombe Nursery development have been taking place and, with Middlemarch’s guidance, getting all the pieces in place to move this project onto the next phases.
This has meant discussing aspirations with our partner Housing Assosciation, Aster, who have a large and growing portfolio of successful housing developments responding to the housing crisis and offering high quality, well-maintained accommodation.
Similarly, we have been looking at sketches and initial plans with our appointed North Devon architects, Woodward Smith who have undertaken several large, local projects with beautiful results.
These two key appointments then depend on a collection on contractors, consultants and advisers: From specialists in conservation and wildlife welfare ensuring we prioritize the local environment to engineers helping us create the right number of homes with the best possible build quality. Now we’re all around the table the next phase of discussion and design can begin in earnest.
We’ve been excited to find we already have some residents to accommodate. Some Greater Horseshoe bats have made the abandoned buildings their home and we are please to be including a dedicated space to house them within the project.
The design stage, we are sure, will be a process of negotiation and collaboration to get the best possible result within what is possible given the complexities of the site. However, whilst the site has been called “unviable” in the past by those hoping to generate high profits from building and selling luxury properties we have an advantage; as a not-for-profit organisation creating affordable housing for long-term rent to local people suddenly what was “unviable” becomes a real possibility.