One Horton Heath Housing Project

Feria Urbanism was appointed by Eastleigh Borough Council to be part of its dedicated team, assembled to design, and deliver the One Horton Heath housing initiative.

Horton Heath is a village in Hampshire and the adjacent greenfield development will double its size. Eastleigh Borough Council has set up a “Development Forum” to allow local community representatives to engage with the process. The Feria Urbanism team was tasked with reinvigorating the forum and designing and leading a fresh engagement.

As outsiders to the process, and with no baggage, we were able to bring a fresh perspective. We established a series of time-efficient workshops (no more than 90 mins max.) to be held at least once a month in the evening. Each event has a focus and a specific outcome that is fed into the design process. To make it clear that we are listening, at the start of each workshop, we present back the results from the previous event and show how it will influence the design process.

The restrictions on public gatherings because of the Covid-19 pandemic forced us to move our engagement process online. We successfully switched to the Microsoft Teams platform where we continued to run interactive community engagement events.

We have had a positive client team reaction to this process: “… we are light years forward from where we have come from” was the message from one local authority officer.