Date published: 2005/09/22
The Cambridge City Council has regular public meetings in compass-based areas of the city. The North Area (Arbury, King's Hedges, East Chesterton and West Chesterton wards) had such a meeting tonight, with the first, and most important, agenda item being a presentation of the new Arbury Camp development, presented by the developer Gallagher, in particular Andy Lawson (assistant projects director) and Mukesh Ladwa (associate construction director). (Arbury Camp is officially in Impington, but morally it is closer to Cambridge than to Impington, since the A14 is in between.)
Gallagher has planning permission to build up to 900 homes (30% "affordable" housing) and 18000 m2 of office space. The work officially commenced yesterday (although there has been activity on the site for a few weeks already). Tonight's presentation was mainly a rehash of previous presentations. But there were a couple of new tidbits.
Arbury Camp is bordered on the north by the A14, so there is an immediate noise problem, about to get worse when the A14 gets widened. One way to mitigate that was for the offices to be put between the A14 and the housing. However tonight it was stated that it is unlikely the offices will be built until way into the future, apparently the soft Cambridge office market has put Gallagher off (and some people stupidly believe Cambridge is a boom town). So instead of offices as the shield, Gallagher is proposing a fence.
The other interesting news was also about the A14. The A14 is (supposedly) going to be widened. Under the published Highway Agency plans the A14 will go from being two lanes (in each direction) to four on this section. As part of the infrastructure development for Arbury Camp, Gallagher is widening the A14 embankment. But instead of two lanes, they are only widening it enough for one lane. And the Highway Agency signed this off. Unbelievable.
There were representatives from the city council (of course, since it was their meeting) and also from the Histon and Impington district council (in the audience). Gallagher has not had too much to do with these politicians, but instead has had to deal with South Cambs district council. And there is obviously extremely bad blood between the city/town politicans and the SouthCambs/county politicians, with the former all but accusing the latter of gross negligence over Arbury Camp. (Unfortunately there seemed to be no representatives of the latter at the meeting to defend themselves.)
The audience (mostly the usual middle class suspects) was allowed to ask questions. Not surprisingly the most pressing issue was transport. Guess what, the roads of Cambridge are busy and if you add more housing you get more traffic. As it happens, at evening rush hour, King's Hedges Road is usually backed up from the lights at Cambridge Road quite some distance. Arbury Camp is almost bound to make that worse (although it is not totally obvious since without commercial offices on the site most traffic at that time will be into rather than out of the site). Several people voiced various concerns about that and were rather rude to the Gallagher representatives. But what is Gallagher supposed to do about it, magically wave a wand? (Well, in fact some of the road changes they are paying for might make it better.) And as part of this development, the speed limit on that part of King's Hedges Road will drop from 40 and 60 mph to 30 mph. And in Arbury Camp itself the speed limit will be 20 mph. In a moment of surreal theatre, someone from the audience berated Gallagher for not spending time and effort trying to get a 20 mph limit on the other, existing, roads in the area. Meanwhile back on Planet Earth...
There was also some discussion about the proposed Cambridgeshire Guided Bus (CGB) scheme, which is supposed to have one route traversing Arbury Camp. Gallagher has an interest in the CGB as well, so they are happy for it to proceed, and have set aside some land at Arbury Camp for this to happen. Here again the local councils are in conflict with the county councils, with the latter the main proponents of the CGB. Hopefully central government will decide against the scheme (but it's likely they will decide for it, since that is the current politically correct thing to do, no matter how wasteful of money that it is). And it seems the CGB will be given some kind of preference at the King's Hedges Road and Cambridge Road junction, which of course will make that junction even worse (for cars, and no doubt cyclists).
Gallagher has apparently paid £6.9 million for transport development (around £2 million of that for the CGB) as part of the section 106 agreement (for those who do not know, section 106 is the idiotic way that the UK claws back some gain from giving planning permission to large developments such as Arbury Camp). Apparently as part of that there was talk at some time that there would be a cycle path put in over the A14 (as there now is at Milton) but Lawson said this was not included in the agreement.
Finally, there was a small mention about the name for the new development. It has been known as Arbury Camp for some time now (at least five years). But Gallagher has decided to change the name to Arbury Park, because it sounds better from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately Arbury Park is not going to attract up-market households. Who wants to be on top of the A14 like that? And although Arbury Camp will have a new primary school, the secondary school for the residents will apparently be Manor Community College, which is hardly going to attract people. Given the crazy house prices in Cambridge, Gallagher should have no trouble making loads of money on Arbury Camp, but it's unlikely this development will be any better than the endless monotonous housing on the other side of King's Hedges Road.
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