"So you’ve got a big challenge, not only in Sandown"

Part of the summing up at the Sandown Charrette Thursday 02/02/12 by Julian Farrar

"Town centres, do not forget the importance, the absolute primacy of Nairn’s quality is in your town centre and the protection of that, the articulation of its value, is what is going to in part create for Sandown in success. Your value in part in Sandown and in terms of Delnies is because you are not bolting this onto something which is of an indifferent value, you’re bolting this onto something which is of prime quality and the reason and the people you want to attract into Nairn are based around this town centre and the community and all the community infrastructure and community facilities. And you’ve got another big phase of that, in my mind, when I park out there in that car park, in the derelict bits and pieces. So you’ve got a big challenge, not only in Sandown. You’ve got a big challenge within the town centre and its about community growth […] You’ve got to see this as an opportunity for community growth, we’ve talked about urban design, we’ve talked about design principles but we are not just talking about people and place […]

And I think we need to look at this when we’ve looked at phasing as something that can grow organically, something that isn’t threatening, something that isn’t parachuted in from outside, something that lessons can be learned as we break it down into bits, and we release land in phases, where we can keep a level of custodial control over release of land. It’s also the mechanism by which you’ll secure value.

The previous model isn’t a viable model in our current market and probably not in the current market for the next decade. That’s probably being pessimistic about the market but it’s a market that has got a long time to recover in terms of strategic land for housing. So effectively it should be an evolving design and that’s why I argue to you […] to ensure that you protect flexibility going forward and there has to be in flexibility a level of trust. And you’ve been scarred, you’ve had all these issues, you’ve had other things and you need to keep moving forward. You can look back at that, you can learn lessons from that but you also need to keep moving forward because actually capturing the opportunity is also about effectively providing either the flexibility or adaptation to meet future needs."