The tiny village eyed by Labour as site for ‘city larger than Oxford’

The 600 residents of Tempsford face gaining up to 350,000 new neighbours if plans go ahead

The tiny Bedfordshire village of Tempsford once had a brief but fateful stint as a strategic fortress during the Viking invasions.
In the 900s, the Danes had built a base there to attack the shires, but their assault on Bedford failed. Instead, they were besieged at Tempsford by the Anglo Saxon army. It was here that the Danish King met a sticky end.
More than a thousand years on, the 600-person village is again being eyed as a strategic site. This time, it is a prime candidate for massive housing development as part of Labour’s manifesto pledges to build “a new generation of new towns” and achieve the highest sustained economic growth in the G7.
On Wednesday, Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, launched an independent New Towns Taskforce, to recommend locations that can be developed into new towns to deliver “hundreds of thousands” of homes in the decades to come.
Headed by Sir Michael Lyons, a former chief executive of three local authorities, and Dame Kate Barker, an ex-Bank of England rate-setter, the taskforce will find places to build new communities of “at least 10,000 new homes, with many significantly larger”. 
The pair will spend the next 12 months making their decisions, but economists and developers argue there is one place that stands out as the most obvious option.
Tempsford may be small, but it is attractively located.
It sits in the geographic sweet spot between the major employment centres of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It is bisected by the A1, is due to get a station on the new planned East West Railway, which will connect Oxford and Cambridge, and it would be relatively easy to build it a stop on the East Coast Main Line, which runs from London to Edinburgh.
“That would basically connect Edinburgh to Oxford and Cambridge, which is a huge zone of economic opportunity. For a Government that is so focused on growth, this is just an insane possibility,” says Kane Emerson, head of housing research at the Yimby Alliance.
Dame Kate has made clear that it will be “vital” that the new town locations will support long-term economic growth.
Tempsford has already been identified as a site that is prime for development by the National Infrastructure Commission. Last year, an East West Railway technical report suggested that the village’s population could eventually rise by 44,000 in the years after the planned station opens.
Urban&Civic, a residential developer, has already acquired options with Homes England to build up to 7,000 homes on 2,113 acres of land around the village.
In a July article for think tank UK Day One, Emerson and Samuel Hughes, head of housing at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), argued that Tempsford should become a major city larger than Oxford or Cambridge, with homes for up to 350,000 people.
As well as housing, developers could build laboratory space to meet excess demand from Oxford and Cambridge and turn Tempsford into a life sciences employment hub in its own right, says Emerson.
The New Towns Taskforce is an echo of similar Labour policy in the aftermath of the Second World War, which drove the construction of settlements including Milton Keynes and Stevenage.
It is part of a wider Labour drive to “get Britain building again” and follows an increase in housing targets announced by Rayner on Tuesday. A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) spokesman said the taskforce’s work “will be an important step on the path to delivering the 1.5m homes we need”.
Nigel Hugill, chief executive of Urban&Civic, says building more major strategic sites in the London commuter belt will be absolutely essential if Labour wants to meet its housing targets, because this is where housing needs are most out of kilter with supply.
“There were 32 new towns [built after the Second World War], plus a few additions. But of those, every one outside the South East of England, with the exception of Warrington, has not met its population target.
“It’s very clear to me that if we are to have a new generation of new towns, the fundamental placement of them should be in and around South East England,” says Hugill.
Urban&Civic is ready to build them, he says. “We’ve been doing it for 10 years in a way that nobody else has.”
The developer’s track record includes turning the London 2012 Olympic site into Stratford City. It has also just confirmed it will acquire L&Q Estates, the land-buying arm of housing association L&Q, which means it has acquired major land reserves around Milton Keynes – another area that Hugill says is ripe for expansion.
How could Tempsford be developed?
“I think you would do an updated version of Milton Keynes, though fewer roundabouts for sure,” says Hugill.
Milton Keynes is based on a system of individual neighbourhoods and green spaces.
“When you’re building new communities, you need to put places where parents can meet in front of schools, and you need to put children’s playgrounds near primary schools. You need to encourage walking to school,” says Hugill.
Emerson says development should be dense within a 15-minute walk of the train station, to help alleviate housing pressures in London, Oxford and Cambridge.
Development could be rapid. If the Government moves fast and picks the right locations, residents could be moving into the first new towns before the end of this parliament, says Hugill. Developers just need planning permission.
But in Tempsford, the residents are already gearing up for a fight.
“People are angry. It would be a disaster for us,” says David Sutton, chairman of the local parish council.
Sutton argues that new homes should instead be built on the edges of existing towns. “Nobody would notice because the people who live there chose to live in a town. The families who live here chose to live in a rural community.”
Hugill argues that there is a way to convince people that development is good.
“Strategic sites have to be infrastructure first,” he says. He argues that if new schools and GP surgeries can be built first, existing residents will benefit from new amenities before the new demand arrives from the additional homes.
But whether or not they like it, Emerson says existing residents may have no choice if their neighbourhood is designated for new town development.
“This Labour Government is so resolute on going for growth that even if it were a marginal Labour seat I think they would still go for it. Because people will punish Labour if they don’t reach their targets in five years’ time or if there is no sign of growth,” he says.
Tempsford, however, may have another trick up its sleeve: it is a village that is closely connected to its long history.
Sutton lives in a 450-year-old house that he claims is home to a ghost. “It’s a lady in her early 20s, wearing a white nightgown,” he says. He has seen her three or four times on the landing.
“The ghost likes us,” says Sutton. “The new town would definitely be haunted.”