Shiv Malik

It's called Forest City.

That's at least the name of the project thus far.

It'll be located just to the east of Cambridge, a place of huge amounts of growth, but strategically hasn't really come together until now.

It's located over kind of 45,000 acres crossing both Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

It'll contain one of England's largest nature reserves, in fact, the largest on land.

So 12,000 acres and also about almost 20%, 25% of the entire city will just be trees and woodland and a medieval forest.

And a new central business district, new transport, about 45 billion worth of investment into hard infrastructure.

So really, it's about bringing all these things together biologically.

putting Britain back on the map in terms of what we can actually do and reminding ourselves that we are people who do stuff, amazing things.

Why have we not built cities for 50 years?

That's a really good question.

It's one I kind of asked after I'd written the book.

I went and spent a couple of years just asking architects, why don't we do this in the West, right?

So it's not just Britain, obviously, who hasn't done this.

And the answers are kind of various.

Oh, it's just kind of passé, you know, the failures of kind of the 1950s and 60s, Le Corbusier's failures of kind of grand planning.

And so it just fell out of almost fashion, which seemed to be a kind of ridiculous notion that we could sort of not want to imbue new places with a sense of purpose and a sense of a better future.

There is no good explanation except for, I guess, you know, it goes with everything else.

We haven't really just done much in this country in the way of building physical kind of infrastructure and homes for decades now.

I think as a people, we're quite sceptical of the kind of, I mean, it's a French word, the sort of grand projet, right?