In 2018, a group of residents from Thame in Oxfordshire founded a Community Land Trust, having seen the price of land and property rise beyond the means of most local people, and beyond the hope of ‘genuinely affordable’ housing. With support from Homes England, the group has worked with Transition by Design over the last 18 months towards this successful planning application for 31 homes over a three-acre rural site. The architect has supported the trust in securing grants from the Community Housing Fund and Community Led Homes Start-up Fund, and guided the community through the process of imagining a scheme to now being in a position to construct a secure future in the area.
In all, 16 of the properties will be for affordable rent with 15 for discount market sale. They will draw on local architectural vernaculars towards a typology of short terraces configured around green clusters and courtyards with a mix of on and off-plot parking. A generous central green and folly keeps the properties’ focus inwards, while at the west edge of the site is a natural play area adjoining an attenuation pond, with a wildflower meadow to the east.
Architecturally, the houses vary between 1 and 3 beds, with details that modernise Oxfordshire salt-glazed bricks, lime renders and header coursing to articulate facades. Each unit has a stacked-course brick porch, offering a punctuating motif to the street, with lime render of hues inspired by the surrounding rural palette. Planting across the scheme priorities biodiversity, native species and ‘an abundance of fruits, flowers, seeds and nuts’, which it is hoped will also entice cyclists and walkers off the adjacent Phoenix Trail to stop for a break.
More info can be found here.
