Bringing Landowners, Investors, and Bright Minds Together to Unlock Untapped Potential

The absence of a national housing strategy in the UK remains extraordinary. This void has directly contributed to the widespread poor housing we see today, which significantly impacts the economy and the nation’s health. Housing issues lie at the heart of stagnant growth and productivity, touching every aspect of our prosperity.

Housing delivery—and, more importantly, its performance—remains central to the national debate and will define this generation, for better or worse. The truth is, there is no quick fix. Decades of poor decision-making, short-sighted policies, and a lack of political will have led us here. Yet, it’s crucial to acknowledge that housing delivery is a complex ecosystem requiring a delicate balance of economics, design, and policy. When one of these becomes the sole driver, the equilibrium is lost, leading to poor outcomes—or no outcomes at all.

Planning reforms have long been discussed, and it’s encouraging to see some substantive progress in the debate. The key takeaway is the need to shift planning out of the political sphere and beyond the bureaucracy of development “control” into a more strategic, enabling model. This approach should prioritize development, affordable housing delivery, and investment.

Key reforms could include a cross-party accord, streamlined grant funding processes, the release of public land, a long-overdue national review of greenbelt land (the last was in 1949), and restoring strategic planning at the city-region level. These measures would free planners to focus on spatial planning rather than regulatory functions.

Implementing these changes would address numerous challenges, including skill shortages, employment, regional development, social care, and sustainability—proving the interdependence of these areas with housing policy.

Our mixed-use masterplan for Barnsley West exemplifies how collaboration among landowners, statutory bodies, investors, and expert minds can deliver impactful housing and placemaking.

Key Facts:

Client: Strata Homes & Sterling Capitol
Local Authority: Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council
Timeline: 2019–2025
Scale: 1,800 homes, 41 hectares of employment land, school, community buildings, new link road, and public open spaces
Role: Masterplanner
Value: £315 million

As the largest site within the Barnsley Local Plan, this former open-cast mine posed significant challenges, requiring extensive collaboration and innovative solutions. Our role as masterplanner included leading the design process, authoring an industry-leading Design Code, and balancing placemaking with commercial viability.

The site’s challenging topography, with significant level changes, initially made it seem unviable. However, through the use of advanced Building Information Modelling (BIM), we optimised earthworks to unlock more developable land, ensuring the project’s viability and maximising housing delivery. This approach facilitated informed dialogue among stakeholders, enabling precise cost/viability testing, risk management, and programme efficiency, while integrating low-carbon and net-zero considerations at critical milestones.

Our role as masterplanner was both unique and multifaceted, guiding a consortium through the masterplan adoption process and authoring an industry-leading Design Code. This code balanced multi-generational placemaking with commercial insight, ensuring we could deliver high-quality buildings and spaces. As one of the largest new settlements in the north of England, our work demonstrates our expertise in major strategic masterplans, playing a key role in addressing the urgent need for housing.

The project’s success was underpinned by extensive public consultation, stakeholder engagement, and managing a complex Design Review Process on a highly constrained site. This comprehensive approach ensured we met both the functional and environmental objectives of the development.

The new settlement is landscape-led with resident and user “Health and Wellbeing” requirements at the heart of the masterplan, being a direct response to existing, retained and proposed landscape.  All homes are carefully located in such a manner to connect with a rich and diverse range of recreation spaces that enhance health and wellbeing, in addition to the placement of buildings, homes and streets to optimise solar gain, outlook, reduced car use and designing out crime within the following components:

• Gateways: Primary buildings at site entrances create a “gateway arrival” giving a distinct identify that compliments the adjacent communities.
• Layout of streets and buildings creates a series of linked “heart spaces”. These are designed in a range of sizes and scales to give variety and identity to different neighbourhoods that are linked with pedestrian / cycle routes, capturing key views of surrounding views
• At the heart of the scheme is a civic square – recognising that this community will be used by people from far and wide and jot just residents. Within the square sits a school and community buildings.
• All edges to the development are respected with gardens backing onto adjacent gardens along the boundary and strong edges to neighbourhoods to give definition to open spaces.

Social impact was fundamental to the masterplan.  Creating a development of this size comes with significant responsibility that Bond Bryan take very seriously and the scheme incorporates the following social impact factors:

• Activity: through new passive and active recreation facilities, formal and informal play areas, paths and trails, safe routes to school and work to promote walking and cycling for young and old
• Strong and resilient landscape features for people to adopt space for events and social gatherings through the seasons
• Connection to nature at every opportunity
• Improved biodiversity through retention of existing trees and woodland but also the creation of new meadows, wetlands, hedgerows and forests
• Reducing carbon footprint and improving air quality through mass tree planting and encouraging travel away from the car

Within the forecast planning reforms present huge opportunity for a deeper coalition that brings landowners, investors, and bright minds together to unlock untapped potential for quality housing delivery on a huge scale.

Schemes like this will become the case study for this delivery to meet the homes we desperately need but ultimately create the kind of places that shape our culture, our society and economic prosperity.