How will Forest City affect Haverhill?

Forest City will change Haverhill, that's for sure. We believe it changes it like this: a town of 27,000 becomes the gateway to a city of a million, with a train station, a hospital on its doorstep, training colleges, and tens of thousands of new customers within a few miles of its high street. Haverhill's businesses gain a market twenty times their current size. Haverhill's young people gain somewhere to live without leaving.

The alternative is not "no change." If Forest City doesn't happen, the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation plans 150,000 homes, many along the A1307—more pressure on the same roads, the same GP surgeries, and the same water supply, with no station, no hospital, and no say for Haverhill.

There are real open questions—about the high street, about local businesses—and we want Haverhill to answer them, not us. That's why we're hosting a series of co-design sessions just for Haverhillians: for the first time, Haverhill in the driver's seat rather than having things done to it by Cambridge and Suffolk.