About

Caterham Barracks Village was developed by Linden Homes South-East on 16 hectares of former Ministry of Defence army barracks in 1998. For over 100 years, the original army barracks dominated the community of Caterham-on-the-Hill. Following its closure in 1995, significant social and economic impacts were felt in the town. Tandridge District Council organised a public consultation that designated a large part of the site a Conservation Area and produced a Planning brief. Although the brief was considered unviable by many developers, locally based Linden Homes bought the site, believing that additional development would be acceptable if significant community benefits were delivered.

Completed in 2008, February 2018 marked 20 years since the “ground-breaking” community-planning weekend at Caterham Barracks. Facilitated by John Thompson & Partners (JTP) on behalf of Linden Homes, between February 27th and March 3rd 1998, over 1000 people attended the weekend to create a vision for what was to become of the village – a mixed-use neighbourhood with its own Community Development Trust. This was the first time that a large-scale collaborative planning process has been promoted in the UK by a private developer, and the success of the Village has been recognised through numerous national and international awards.

Project details

The site was first purchased in 1998 and was completed in 2008. It is now 20 years old and is an example of a private developer using consensus-led master planning to create a new sustainable community.

The development is a mixed use neighbourhood that includes housing, supermarkets, offices, veterinary hospital, doctors surgery, indoor skateboard and BMX centre, landscaping and open space. 361 homes have a range of housing tenures; blocks of different tenures are pepper-potted across the development. The listed chapel and 18 other buildings were refurbished. The site was reconnected to its surroundings through reuse and the opening of the boundary wall for accessibility to the newly created public realm, amenities and services. A dedicated, self-financing bus service to connect the village with Caterham railway station was created.

A local resident championed more facilities for young people, and within a few months ‘Skaterham’, a youth project providing skateboard, inline and BMX facilities, was set up in the former gymnasium. In March 2002 it transferred from the gymnasium to the listed chapel, and now has thousands of active members.

Governance of the new Village at Caterham is through a Community Development Trust: the Caterham Barracks Community Trust. This was the direct result of the Community Planning Weekend, where local people expressed a desire for on-going involvement in the creation and running of the community. The trust was established to manage the community facilities and manages leisure and business facilities and creates jobs for local people. It has 11 Trustees, including a resident trustee and an employer trustee. The Trust took over management of buildings and open spaces for community use.

Resources

Contract value: £60 million

Participants in the 1998 weekend workshop identified possible community uses for existing buildings retained as part of the new neighbourhood, to be paid for by the increase in the number of homes provided on site.

The developers contributed over £3 million under the Section 106 agreement, which included the gift of a number of existing buildings to the Caterham Barracks Community Trust:

• The chapel (now the skate park, Skaterham)
• The village green and pavilion (cricket facilities)
• The former gymnasium (now a children’s soft play adventure park, theatre, café, dance studios and gallery/ exhibition space – completed 2007)
• Jolliffe Field (football pitches)
• Children’s play area (north of the gyms)
• New bus service linking the Hill with the Valley,
• £100,000 towards education,
• £50,000 towards transport improvements,
• £60,000 towards the ‘local area’,
• Bus vouchers for residents (£200)
Costs of community planning weekend and all consultation paid for by the developer. Architects JTP continue to support the development of Skaterham, both financially and more directly, most recently by creating pro bono visualisations to support proposals for a new café.

Community involvement

In 1995, a local group was set up by the council as a forum for discussion about the site. In 1998, the Community Planning Weekend involved over 1,000 local people. The event was structured around topic-based workshops, hands-on planning sessions, through which participants could discuss and contribute their design ideas. Teenagers from several local schools were involved, and local people could tour the barracks by bus.

The Community Planning Weekend marked the beginning of an on-going process of collaboration between the community, the developers and the local authority, with the aim of creating a responsive new neighbourhood with a strong sense of place. The local group continued to be an important forum. In 2000 the Community Development Trust was set up to manage community uses.

Who are the key stakeholders involved?

• Linden Homes South-East: Developer.
• Tandridge District Council: Local planning authority.
• The Guinness Trust: Developer of affordable homes for rent.
• John Thompson & Partners (JTP): Community planning, masterplanning and architecture.
• Caterham Barracks Community Trust: Management of leisure and business facilities.
• Residents of Caterham Barracks Village & surrounding areas.

Impact: What are the outcomes? Who benefits?

Consensus-led approach helped residents understand that demands for community facilities were only financially achievable and sustainable with a higher density of new housing than they initially wanted. This led to changes to the original development brief: a higher number of mixed-tenure housing units enabled the developer to fund a variety of additional facilities for the local community.

A responsive, sustainable management body was successfully established, to manage leisure and business facilities on the site and uses its assets to create jobs for local people.

So what?

Key learning

“Social Sustainability: Process, Place, People” published by JTP, outlines 12 rules of engagement learnt from the Caterham. These include:
1. Embrace champions: The creation of great places is dependent on champions – sometimes even going against the grain. The success of The Village is largely down to a small group of people who used their influence, skills and enthusiasm at different stages of the project to help nurture a fledgling community into existence.

2. Animate in advance: Great neighbourhoods depend on creative types who thrive on innovation and newness. Track them down, convince them to get involved and harness their energy by making what you do benefit what they do.

3. Say it how it is: Most people understand that commercial realities need to be addressed, but a meaningful negotiation can only take place if trust is established from the outset. Communicate truthfully, clearly and often – and don’t start the process unless you mean to finish it.

4. Do real engagement: In community engagement, don’t confuse participation with consultation. Participation means inviting people to get involved in shaping their own future – that’s localism. Whereas asking people for their views on a fait accompli is nothing more than public relations. People get hostile when they want the former and are offered the latter.

5. Use gentle persuasion: Attempting to achieve something new or different requires charm and persistence. However remarkable a community initiative, it will entail people buying into the vision and changing their normal way of doing things.

6. Tap local knowledge: There are two sides to every neighbourhood – the physical environment that can be easily observed and understood by professionals and the social experience of everyday life, which is apparent only to local residents and habitual users of a place. Getting proposals right and providing real solutions to real problems means listening very hard to what local people say.

7. Hear every voice: Those who shout the loudest do not necessarily represent the voice of the community – the quiet majority who are usually busy getting on with their own lives. Collaborative planning can bring this into sharp focus and needs to be structured to allow the voices of the many to prevail – ensuring future plans address real community dreams, rather then individual ambitions, personal hang ups or single issue politics.

8. Use plain language: Communicating with local communities means setting aside jargon and explaining complex issues in ways that everyone understands, nothing annoys local people more than abstract talk about new ‘schemes’ that include ‘residential units’. From their perspective they are new neighbourhoods, full of homes that will affect their everyday life for better or for worse.

9. Give youth some space: Caught between childhood and adult world, teenagers have few places to go, forcing them to congregate in public and become a perceived threat. From neighbourhoods to work, teenagers not only require dedicated spaces in which to celebrate their own identity and interests, but they must also play a central role in defining what these facilities are, and help to shape and run them.

10. Crowdsource ideas: Common intelligence is a greater source of wisdom than intelligence drawn down from professional silos. The best ideas emerge from the centre of the circle, creating common ownership of the emerging vision. Listen to local people. They understand the needs of a local area. They know the ins and outs of a place. A design team can never fully understand a place without local knowledge.

11. Listen to leaders: There are multiple layers of democracy happening during a collaborative planning process, and it’s important to remember that those elected to serve the communities often have powerful insights into how a place is working and the issues it is facing by virtue of their on-going work in that community.

12. Get the rules right: The rules governing a neighbourhood set out in planning consents, retail or business leases, sales contracts and tenancy agreements can make or break the good things in life, and yet are generally written by people with little understanding of what makes places function. Great communities need great rules – tight enough to make sure individuals cannot spoil things for the many, and flexible enough to accommodate new ideas when they come along.