We were appointed as an independent design reviewer on Upper Swallick, a proposed garden village near Basingstoke.
Our review covered a full Design Codes Review, a detailed cross-check between the Design and Access Statement (DAS) and the design code itself, and a specific note on flexibility within the proposed village centre and probing where the code offers genuine adaptability and where it risks over-prescription.
This is the kind of scrutiny large-scale new communities need: independent, technically robust, and unafraid to challenge a scheme on behalf of the people who will eventually live there. Garden villages of this scale carry the real risk of losing human scale and everyday joy amidst the long term ambition; our role was to keep that risk visible and addressed. The review was delivered as a direct submission to the local planning authority, ensuring findings were clear, evidenced and usable. We take this critical friend role seriously on complex, high-profile planning applications.
