Patrick Clarke
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 20 May
Patrick Clarke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes, thank you, Toby. As I said, I'm Patrick Clarke, Master Planning Leader at ACOM, working on a range of large-scale new communities on Brownfield, but predominantly on Greenfield sites, between sort of three and a half and 10,000 homes. And I've sort of learned a fair bit from that experience. And placemaking is absolutely fundamental, in my view. It's a very broad term. It's capable of being defined in different ways and different contexts.
But it engages with the social, the economic and the environmental pillars of sustainability. And it also places significant emphasis on working with communities to design with them rather than for them. I think just looking specifically at a Newtown context, I think it operates at two levels.
Firstly, I think there's a macro level. So thinking about the scale of these places, a new town of 10,000 homes is 25,000 people. It's a whole new sort of market town scale of development with all of the land uses and activities that that brings. And also often that development is taking place alongside an existing place. So increasing the size of that from 50 to 75,000 people. So at that scale, there's the opportunity to make a real difference to what you might describe as sort of strategic,
authority-wide sub-regional challenges, whether they're around sort of economic development, the revitalisation of town centres, the energy transition and moving away from car-based living to sustainable public transport, active travel. And then alongside that, I think it's the very important micro side, which is thinking about the grain of places, the character, the identity, the layout of the streets.
the open spaces, the landscape, the design of the homes to create places where people really want to live and feel satisfied in their lives. So I think the challenge for me is we've got to do both of those challenges, the macro and the micro well, and we've got to do them graphically at pace. Perfect. Angela, I'll come to you next. Macro, micro, does that resonate with you in terms of your definition of placemaking?
But square that now with housing targets and type programs and the housing crisis and need to get people somewhere to live. How do you make it all work together? Well, I get the challenges, but I don't see them as mutually exclusive. I think we can deliver at pace. Historically, if anybody wants a really nice reference example, look at the Well Hall or Progress Estate in Greenwich.
that was effectively designed over a weekend during the start of the First World War and was designated as a conservation area in the early 70s. Nicholas Pesner described it as a tour de force in picturesque design. So there's a very particular timeline and model of delivery, but it shows that quality design and great placemaking can be delivered at pace if you have the right people in the room.
I think in a different way, we've done that recently at Brugli, where we developed the island planning application and had that consented within 16 months. We did that by front-loading it with technical evidence and design thinking, so the placemaking didn't come along at the end. This is Brugli, that's Sussex, yeah? In Mid Sussex, yes. It's a scheme of 3,500 homes for homes in England.
So the placemaking was embedded from the start with strategic design principles that made commitments to design outcomes and then a design guide that was submitted for approval with the outline application so that it had teeth and then a street design and an adoption manual that added further layers of detail. So in that case
We worked progressively through the design agenda, nailing what we could at the right times so that design thinking was embedded, but it was working at pace alongside all the technical work. And that enabled the scheme to move forward into delivery very rapidly compared to most large-scale schemes. Okay.
Yeah, I think looking at things holistically is really important. So I think as a general principle, front loading the process with technical evidence, with stakeholder engagement and drawing all of that together so that you can do a proper synthesis of all of the issues at the macro and the sort of the micro levels and generate a series of options that address
you know, the key strategic challenges, as well as the sort of the placemaking alternatives, and then be able to evaluate them against, you know, a broadly based framework that includes liability and cost assessment, because our recently published cost model indicates, you know, the cost of the infrastructure going alongside new community projects is of the order of £67,000 per home. You know, that varies quite significantly between sites.
And that's probably more in a greenfield type context. But it's a sizable cost. And clearly, you've got to be thinking very carefully from the outside about what is the infrastructure delivery strategy for the site and what can be brought in through partnership working and working beyond the red light of the site itself to think about sort of...
Sorry, upgrading existing infrastructure and getting synergies between existing communities and the new communities. So you've got a sort of what you might call a whole place approach rather than something that's confined to within the red lines of the new town itself. I wonder as we're looking forward, Angela, whether there are lessons of the past you think we should be remembering as we start making our plans for the next few decades?
Okay, Patrick, are you prepared to join the revolution? We're storming the battlements this afternoon. So are you ready? Yeah, absolutely. The mission emergency are appropriate terms. We've been talking about the housing supply being in shortage since the Barker review in the early 2000s. And we're in 2026, so that's not getting better quickly. So we need to step up again.
I think equally we should acknowledge the progress that we have made. Going back 15 years ago, large-scale housing projects were the least popular form of development in the country, probably. And the larger they were, the more unpopular they were. Last year, the task force asked for locations that could accommodate 10,000 homes or more, and there were...
reportedly more than 100 locations put forward, largely by local authorities. So that says to me that there's no shortage of ambition to lead at the local level to deliver homes and infrastructure. I think the reason for that change in attitude is the recognition that if you plan at a bigger scale, you can identify the infrastructure that's needed. You can identify the macro challenges that I
alluded to at the start, and plan positively to deliver them. And you can capture a lot of the infrastructure cost requirement from the uplifted land value. So we've made significant progress, but we now need to build on that platform really urgently. Andrew, we talked about trust before. We've talked about the need of the community. Do you think the community's got enough of a voice and that they're invested enough in this and they feel that their voice is being heard?
Anything else that might have an investment life of 25 years, and if it's not working after that, you can knock it down and replace it with something else. Housing passes to individual owners, to housing associations, and becomes their responsibility to look after. So it needs to be designed really well with that type of life in mind. I think on Wellborn, we were asked to create a legacy master plan for the landowner who wanted to create a legacy for South Hampshire.
So looking at places that had stood the test of time and met the housing needs and aspirations of successive generations was really important to us. And after a sort of fairly extensive road trip, one of the places that really stood out to us and met the sort of Cathy, your point around the last 500 metres, you know, the micro level, was Brentham, Gordon Suburb and Ealing.
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