Build a city. Repair the countryside.

Not a park. A nature reserve, run for nature.

The 12,000 acres are set aside principally for nature and managed in its best interests. It would be the largest urban adjacent nature reserve in the UK, threading through the city so every neighbourhood touches it.

This isn't a dense plantation. It's a return to the older English idea of woodland: oak, birch and willow among ponds, marshes and meadow, kept dynamic by grazing animals rather than contractors with strimmers.

Working with what's there

Most development in Britain clears a site, builds, then plants a few trees and calls it restoration. Forest City rejects that. Our Nature Expert Working Group's plan starts from what already exists:

Every acre of ancient woodland is preserved. It's irreplaceable, so it stays. Existing woods, hedgerows, ponds and wetlands are kept and form the structure of the reserve. Lost woodland and historic ponds are restored to their 1880 boundaries, mapped from the old surveys, with historic woods marked and named. The River Stour runs through the reserve with a buffer either side.

And the missing wildlife comes back. Beavers have already returned to Suffolk after 400 years. The plan is to reintroduce lost keystone species across the reserve, so the children of Forest City grow up somewhere they can actually see them.

Standards with teeth

Green promises from developers are cheap. Ours would be legally enforceable, written into the legislation that permits the city or into binding nature covenants, with targets negotiated with Natural England: Local Nature Reserve status within 5 years, National Nature Reserve within 10, SSSI quality within 25.

The reserve itself would be governed on a guardianship model, managed primarily in the interests of nature, not as a maintenance contract.

Nature in the city too

The reserve is the anchor, not the whole story. Transport corridors double as wildlife corridors, with land bridges over major roads and verges managed for wildflowers. The working group's target across transport infrastructure is 30% biodiversity net gain. Ponds, wetlands and meadows run through the city itself.

The choice isn't between this land as it is and this land built on. It's between monoculture fields and a city wrapped in forest.