The Fordingbridge Neighbourhood Plan is now being readied for its Pre-Submission (Reg 14) Consultation, scheduled for autumn 2026. This will be an event that marks a significant milestone in a process that has been built from the ground up.
It started in early 2025 with local schoolchildren imagining the town’s future, with ideas for a zip-line over the River Avon becoming a symbol of the community’s appetite for a new riverside crossing. From there, a Community Planning event tested those ideas with over fifty local representatives, before a September 2025 public exhibition brought nearly 500 residents into the conversation, with 78% backing the emerging town centre vision.
Since then, dozens of volunteers have carried out 25 x evidence-gathering tasks, such as mapping shopfronts, counting footfall, surveying river access and lighting, to ensure each policy is grounded in real, local evidence.
The draft plan sets out policies across nine themes: Town Centre Vitality, Active Travel, Riverside Access, Dark Skies, Ecology, Heritage, Climate Resilience, Car Parking, and New Housing. Together they aim to protect independent trade, open up the River Avon, safeguard dark skies bordering Cranborne Chase, embed nature recovery, and ensure any new housing is shaped through a genuine community-led design process before applications are ever submitted.
This is still a working draft, open to further testing and consultation ahead of formal submission, scheduled for early 2027.
