July Update: Under-Budget Homes, a New Strategic Planner, and a Packed RICS Launch

Hello to all those interested in how the plans for the UK’s first city in 50 years are developing. May and June were our busiest months yet, so there’s plenty to update you on.

The £350k four-bed house: on track

Our detailed costing and design work on the flagship four-bedroom family home looks like it’s fully on track. This is wonderful news — it means we’re a huge step closer to making the affordability promise at the heart of Forest City real.

Working with Groupworks and robotics firm Automated Architecture (AUAR), there’s still plenty more to do, but the material palette is genuinely beautiful and we can’t wait to show you. Once more finalised renders of the house are ready, we’ll open national email sign-ups for people who want one of these homes. If you are priced out of owning a home near where the jobs are, you’ll want to be on that list. You can read more in the FT here.

A revised route to delivery: Spatial Development Strategies

We’ve sharpened our delivery strategy around Spatial Development Strategies (SDSs) — the new generation of strategic plans that mayoral and strategic authorities across England are now required to produce, setting out where housing, transport, water and energy infrastructure will go across whole sub-regions over the coming decades.

This is exactly the scale at which Forest City makes sense. Rather than fighting site-by-site through the local plan system, a city of this ambition belongs in the strategic plan for the East of England — and that’s where we’re now focused on putting it.

To lead this work we’ve appointed Bev Hindle as our strategic planner. Bev is the former director of the Oxford–Cambridge Arc Leadership Group and one of the most experienced strategic planning figures in the country. Having someone of Bev’s calibre on the team is a major step up in our capacity to engage seriously with the planning system.

Government engagement

We’re in continuing dialogue across central and local government — local councillors, MPs, and civil and public servants across the East of England and in Whitehall.

The incoming Prime Minister’s agenda — with its emphasis on municipalism and empowered local delivery — fits Forest City remarkably well. We are, in effect, a municipalist project: bringing housing, water, transport and energy together into a single, coherent city-scale undertaking rather than leaving them to fragmented, uncoordinated delivery. We’ve written more about this in Arguably, and the full case is set out in the introduction to our main feasibility report.

APPG event in Parliament

The East of England All-Party Parliamentary Group invited us to present. With strong attendance including four MPs — Charlotte Cane, Jess Asato, Pam Cox and Daniel Zeichner — alongside professionals from across housing, development and infrastructure, the discussion was very warm and constructive. There was a clear appetite for Forest City to sit within an official government workstream so that engagement can happen through formal channels — exactly where the SDS route takes us. You can read the official minutes here.

RICS launch event

In mid-May, the amazing Innovation Nursery sponsored our report launch event at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Over 100 people joined us for speeches from our advisory board chair, Dame Patricia Hewitt, Innovation Nursery’s John Brown, and architect and founding director of 5th Studio, Tom Holbrook, who presented some amazing geographic and historical background on the site and the start of a new spatial image. In attendance were landowners, developers, construction and social housing practitioners, politicians from across the spectrum, and many, many more.

Dame Patricia Hewitt speaking at the podium during the RICS report launch — Scenes from the report launch at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. See more in the full write-up.

Guests gathered at RICS for the Forest City report launch — Scenes from the report launch at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. See more in the full write-up.

Off the back of it we were offered at least a dozen follow-on meetings, many from people we’d engaged with before who now understand Forest City has real momentum.

Read the full write-up: Report Launch at RICS.

New website

We launched an updated website at forestcity.uk, with a suite of new pages including one dedicated to municipalism and the political economy of the city, plus a fully revised FAQ. Do have a look around — there’s a lot of new information there.

In the media

Forest City has been everywhere these last two months — podcasts, the BBC, two features in the FT, and plenty of regional and industry press. Here’s a selection:

Financial Times — ‘Bonkers’: the audacious plan for a 1mn-person city near Cambridge
Financial Times — Can robots build new towns — and other blue-sky thinking
BBC Sounds, Radical Podcast — The Great British Housing Crisis: Is a Brand New Mega-City the Answer?
YouTube — Panel discussion: Are there solutions to the UK’s housing crisis?
The Kingston Society — Forest City 1: a proposed new city for one million people and one of the most audacious planning ideas in modern Britain
Politics Home — “We Are The Cavalry”
BBC Suffolk — New forest city still happening, says businessman
New Civil Engineer — Proposed new Cambridgeshire city would need metro system, SMR and desalination plant
Challenger Cities Podcast, EP90 — It Only Sounds Mad Because We Think Small with Shiv Malik
More on our Media page

And if that wasn’t enough…

Cambridge employers. We met with several multinationals in Cambridge. The message was consistent: housing their employees is a major and growing problem for them — which is precisely the problem Forest City solves.
On the ground. We attended a parish council meeting in Kedington and will keep showing up locally to listen and answer questions directly. Our next village meeting will be in early August.
UKREiiF. We attended the UK’s biggest developer conference in May, meeting with regional politicians, developers and civil servants, and Shiv also spoke on a panel about the future of the rental sector.
Fresh thinking. Students from the University of East Anglia presented their visions for Forest City — schooling, culture and more. Some genuinely brilliant ideas we’ll be integrating into plans as they develop.
Infrastructure. We’ve opened initial discussions with major infrastructure providers in energy, water and transport, as well as major contractors.
East–West Rail. We submitted a formal response to the East–West Rail consultation, recommending the line’s extension east of Cambridge to our proposed Forest City Central site.

What’s next

Watch this space for the four-bed house imagery and the national sign-up launch. In the meantime, the single most useful thing you can do is share the new website — and if you know anyone who should be on this list, forward this along.

Thank you, as ever, for your support.

— Joe & Shiv, Forest City