Founded by Joe Reeve and Shiv Malik, and headlined by former Labour Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Conservative adviser Tim Leunig, their aim is to build a new settlement of/for 1 million people somewhere ‘East of Cambridge’
See https://www.forestcity.uk/ for more
See also their online brochure here
Shiv Malik announced it on Birdsite.
Not everyone is convinced.
The House of Lords debated whether development corporations are the right way go to about expanding settlements/building new towns back in May 2025.
This is the 80-year tension around the concept of development corporations being reflected in our present times over the New Towns proposals and Labour’s housing targets. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again long after I have become plant food.
One of the things Labour seems to have learnt from Tony Blair’s Government is not to get bogged down in consultation and bureaucracy. There were ***huge protests*** across East Anglia in the places where John Prescott imposed new housing targets I recall ‘Stop Harlow North’ who rocked up to Cambridge and chained themselves to the main entrance of the building where I was working – a building that now houses the Cambridge Growth Company (See their latest updates here)
Labour spent 13 years trying to get their regional spatial strategies in place only for Eric Pickles and team to come in and rip them up in a few days. The East of England’s strategy was signed off in March 2010. The general election was a few months after that. Not only did the civil servants working on the RSS suddenly find all that hard work counting for nothing, but also Pickles and the Coalition Govt then shut down the entire regional office network that was instrumental to them, making them all redundant. That said, the ones who were town planning professionals were snapped up by new employers – the chronic shortage of town planners still being an issue.
“This is nonsense – it’s fantasy AI-slop of the like we’ve seen from Create Streets!”
How so?
“The tress would all die from the lack of natural sunlight and the lack of access to rainwater. And the misaligned tramlines?“
Above – AI still has a long way to go to iron out the many imperfections, but what I do get is the aim of creating a ‘mood’ and a vision for the sort of city scenes of the future – a starting point/baseline for debate
If you missed it, see Greater Cambridge: Falling back in love with the future and their proposals for expanding Cambridge here which proposes a wide expansion south of the line from Madingley Road at the Madingley Mulch Roundabout to Newmarket Road (or rather Fulbourn Road), and their proposed building styles.
The reason why these visualisations matter for me is that no one has actually built those visions yet – but we definitely know what boring, bland, and ugly looks like.
Above – Eddington, the new exclusive campus by the University of Cambridge one of the most visually hideous of developments I have seen in my life
“If you had to build a new city, where would you locate it?”
Or rather, if ministers said the Government’s policy was to build a new city in the East of England east of Cambridge but within reasonably close proximity to it, where would you choose?
The first thing to look at is the land map – and the grading of the farm land
Have a look at the map by farmland grade for East Anglia here. I’ve picked out two detailed images from the main map:
Above – Detail of farmland grade of land east-north-east of Cambridge (bottom left) up to the towns (in red) of Thetford (with the forest in muddy orange), and Bury St Edmunds on the right.
And to a slightly different scale so as to include Stansted airporr, Cambridge east-south-east.
Above – Detail of farmland grade of land east-south-east of Cambridge where much of the land is Grade 2-3 farmland
“Sounds like they’ve already selected the location if they are calling it a Forest City”
Thetford forest anyone? (Or the land south of it?) The area between the triangle of Mildenhall (where there’s the track bed of the old railway line as well as the RAF/USAF base), Newmarket (horses) and Bury St Edmunds (Heritage – the old Abbey and early 20thC Cathedral). Furthermore, the Cambridge-Norwich railway line runs alongside the A14 and has a pre-existing rural railway station that’s a prime candidate for a new town in its own right.
Above – detail of land grade map – Newmarket, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds.
“Kennett – sounds familiar”
It should be – I highlighted it in a previous blogpost on the housing demands of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Kennett station – between Newmarket and Bury St Edmunds is a possible new town site when another campaign group stated that all existing rural railway stations should be considered for large medium-high density housing developments & the creation of new communities, and that the land around them should be re-designated en masse as land available for development.
Note this also means significantly upgrading the railway line – ruled out for now by the Transport Secretary.
Above – from Rail Future East and the proposed Cambridge East railway station somewhere between Cherry Hinton and Fulbourn.
Note also Rail Future East Anglia’s annual Cambridge meeting in six weeks.
- Saturday 6th December 2025 – Cambridge at 14:00
- The Signal Box Community Centre, Glenalmond Avenue, Cambridge CB2 8DB
More details from Rail Future here, and see also their back catalogue of newsletters
People mentioned things like:
- Democracy – ‘Who is ‘We’?’ as Jon Burke mentioned at the top of this blogpost
- Water resources – East Anglia is already a water stressed area
- The Climate Emergency vs one of the most carbon-intensive of industries
- Building homes is one thing, building communities is quite another – how do we avoid urban sprawl and building the slums of the future?
- Who gets the money? Where do the profits go?
“What facilities will there be?”
That would be decided by the Strategic Authority (in this case the emerging Suffolk Combined Authority) which will be taking on a host of regional planning powers/responsibilities. There are some rough guides on what people can expect to find as their settlements get larger.
Above – Essential Urban Design (2025) Fig. 2.5 in Rob Cowan’s excellent book
Also, Cambridge is overdue on a host of things.
“We are due an update to the Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire Indoor Leisure Facilities Strategy:”
Looks like a public question for the city council meeting on 04 November 2025. Any takers?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 