Would a site like this work in Burton Bradstock?

Following the CLT’s annual general meeting in June 2024 we watched a presentation from Common Practice, the local architects who we have been working with while we seek a site to build affordable housing within Burton Bradstock.

Jack Cardno described how he and Georgina Bowman are a design and build architecture practice who help connect communities to the land through craft-based research into story, economy and material ecologies. 

In 2023 the CLT had asked Jack and Georgina to open up the conversation around the village’s need for affordable housing by visualising options to encourage people to come forward to propose a site, and providing an illustration of the sort of development that could be built on a plot within Burton Bradstock Parish.

We are still actively seeking a site to build affordable homes for local people in housing need. To build ten houses we only need 1.5 acres of land, preferably, but not necessarily, on the same site. So, if you have any ideas, please get in touch!

They started with the wonderful resources on the village website site and mapped the development of the village.

They then sketched the development of Burton Bradstocks built vernacular through time – starting with imagined roundhouses moving through the 16th century cottages, to the flax mills of the 17th century. Then to the council and developer-built homes of the 20^th century and ending with the static units at Freshwater.

We asked Jack and Georgina to help us open up the conversation around the village’s need for affordable housing, to visualise options to see if anyone comes forward to propose a site, and last but very definitely not least, to visualise possible options for a site

The best of Burton Bradstock’s buildings:

• Suit the landscape because they are made from it

• Suit the people because they are made by them 

• Suit the lifestyle because they have been made and remade in keeping with it

Merging ordinance survey data with census data gives a good understanding of the changing shape of Burton, socially and materially.

In the last one hundred years Burton Bradstock has changed from a village in which most of the people worked on the sea, in quarries, in forestry or agriculture, to a village in which much of the population are retired, and dominant industries have collapsed to be replaced by tourism and hospitality.

The CLT held a series of events to understand what you the people of Burton liked about the village and to test the options we had come up with.

The aim is to create an affordable housing aesthetic that matches the quality of housing in Burton Bradstock by:

1. Regenerating (but not relying on) heritage craft that adds to the aesthetic charm of the buildings – this can be done with small interventions and student workshops. 
2. “Growing” the housing locally 
3. Keeping as much of the economics as local as possible 
4. Offering skills training in building with natural materials throughout the construction of the new housing
5. Matching housing need, but do not depreciating the current value of building stock
6. Offering different options – perhaps from carers who can no longer live with those they care for to families who need more room. 
7. Offering the new industries of tourism and hospitality something through the buildings

One site option – although it is not by any means in the centre of Burton Bradstock, is currently an agricultural field on Station Road, near West Bay, which is in the Burton Bradstock parish.

Jack and Georgina came up with a design for a  small community of straw bale buildings. Each terrace responds to the different types of housing needed by local people in housing need, ranging from single bedroom flats to three bed homes.

This is NOT currently part of a planning application for this site  – the CLT Board consider it is too far away from the village to be viable. But it does show the kind of attractive, liveable and practical development that could be created on a fairly small site.

Please, let us know your thoughts.