Devonshire Gardens, the new sustainable neighbourhood in the heart of Cambridge proposed by First Base and Railpen, will dedicate over half of the site area, equivalent to more than 20 tennis courts, to public open spaces and gardens for the local community to enjoy.
The brownfield site for the proposed redevelopment is currently a Travis Perkins builders’ yard on Devonshire Road. Following extensive consultation with the local community, which highlighted the public’s desire for a naturalistic open space experience, as opposed to a big campus-like development, the green spaces have been designed to be multifunctional, supporting seclusion and reflection, activity, interaction and climate resilience.
At ground level, over 30% of the open space will be soft green landscape and the rest will be hard landscaping to provide access for all – including wheelchairs and pushchairs. First Base and Railpen have also committed to delivering green, biosolar roofs on some of the buildings, to help nature thrive and to allow energy to be generated through zero carbon methods.
The proposed green spaces will also see a 55% increase in the number of trees; the development will retain the vast majority of the existing mature trees and will plant an additional 64 trees across the central green garden and site edges to create a woodland-inspired setting with wildlife benefits. This tree canopy cover, including mostly deciduous species, will provide shade in the summer while letting daylight into the central spaces in winter, plus some evergreen species to provide year-round greenery and winter refuges for wildlife. The development has been designed with sustainability consultancy Bioregional, in accordance with its One Planet Living® framework, and using Natural Cambridgeshire’s Developing with Nature toolkit to enhance and validate the increase in biodiversity. By introducing hundreds of new plant species, including pollinators, alongside 30 raised vegetable patches and herb gardens, the development is set to achieve a net increase of almost 400% in biodiversity.
Marina Goodyear, Senior Project Officer at Bioregional said:
“The ultimate aim of using the One Planet Living® framework from the early stages of design is to create a development that makes it easy and attractive for people to live sustainable lives. A key part of this is about building habits to look after ourselves and our environment – such as building in opportunities to connect to nature and wildlife in our everyday lives to support our health and wellbeing, and so that we learn to value it and protect it.
“What we are most pleased to see in the plans is that there are so many different functions that will be fulfilled using the usable open space, including a community food growing space on the sunniest façade, and natural play features to enable informal play, as well as green roofs and diverse flowering plants to support wildlife, while keeping buildings cooler and slowing rainfall runoff.”
Doug Higgins, Project Director, First Base, said:
“One of our key development objectives for Devonshire Gardens is to create a lush, wild, biodiverse open green space that supports wellbeing and climate resilience. It will be flexible, welcoming, accessible by all and allow social interaction, exercise and play. We have listened to the community about what they want and believe that Devonshire Gardens will be a distinctive development that makes sense in its context. Importantly, because of its location, we are concentrating growth inside the urban area to protect the Green Belt, while also giving the local community a wonderful new open space to enjoy.”