Arriving at the Kidbrooke Village housing development in Greenwich on a morning in early spring, the first thing you notice is the sound of birdsong and the scent of blossom. Geese are gently honking in the distance.
This was once the Ferrier estate, a postwar housing estate that was demolished in 2009 to regenerate the area.
Now the grey, harsh concrete has been replaced by redbrick blocks that sit in a “green corridor” linking Sutcliffe Park in the south with the nature reserves at Kidbrooke Green and London Wildlife Trust’s Birdbrook in the north. Many of the flats overlook new ponds and the expanded wetland of the River Quaggy, which used to flood, putting local businesses and property at risk. While some planning applications elsewhere have been halted because the developers did not survey for bats or consider rare newts, this development has incorporated nature throughout, with bat boxes hanging from trees, and wetlands for newts directly next to the blocks of flats.
The quality blue and green space woven between the flats includes a children’s playground and benches overlooking the wetlands. In the summer, the ponds are fringed with reeds, among which residents can spot reed buntings and kingfishers. When the Guardian visited, it was full of people enjoying a spring day.
Concern for newts and bats holds back the building of new houses, according to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. Yet here, 5,000 new homes are being delivered alongside a paradise for newts. Wildlife trusts have been working closely with housing developers to get good quality homes built alongside habitat for nature.
Other wildlife trust housing sites include Trumpington Meadows in Cambridgeshire, which used to be a potato field. Now it teems with wildlife, including blue butterflies, waxcap fungi and twittering stonechats. Priest Hill, near Epsom in Surrey, has been transformed from abandoned playing fields plus some previously developed land to provide 15 new homes alongside a nature reserve, and the charmingly named Tadpole Garden Village in Wiltshire will have 28 hectares (68 acres) of green space and nearly 2,000 homes.
David Mooney, the chief executive of the London Wildlife Trust, said of Kidbrooke Village: “We were initially brought in to find a nature-based solution to the flooding of the River Quaggy. We linked it to a floodplain and created sustainable urban drainage systems, and then worked with Berkeley Homes to get these flats built around the new wetlands.”
The planning and infrastructure bill, which is going through parliament, strips some requirements for developers to bear nature in mind, and will make it easier for homes to be built without this green infrastructure.
“The Treasury is driving this false wedge between homes and nature,” Mooney said, “but we have been working with housing developers for years and years in harmony. Some developers aren’t as conscientious as others, but the good companies want nature around the new-builds. It improves the mental health of people who live there, to have nature on their doorstep, reduces flooding, provides shade and has so many benefits.”
It also saves money and maintenance to have wild spaces as they do not have to be mowed or tidied. The pretty grassland will, in summer, be a waist-high wildflower meadow.
Gesturing to the meadows and ponds, he said: “They could have built on this. This wasn’t green space, it was concrete. It was a no-go zone wasteland. To some unscrupulous developers, and evidently to Rachel Reeves, this should be built on. But what does that achieve? People love being in this space.”
And newts, evidently, do too, in the ponds of different depths and sizes. “Tell me someone that doesn’t want to have wildlife in their window, nature on their doorstep, you know, who doesn’t want to see a dragonfly buzzing past their window when they’re doing the washing up? People have a really strong affinity with the natural world, and especially when you’re established, and people live here and now take care of it, and volunteering is going on. There’s education. We’re just about to rebuild a nature pavilion.”
He said the presence of bats had been incorporated into the design of the estate. “We have built boxes, and there are also ‘swift bricks’ in which birds can nest in the architecture. It can be done, easily and cheaply.”
The rubble and old waste from the site has been used to create nature mounds rather than going to landfill, on which wildflower seeds will be scattered. People will be able to perch on the little hills, have a picnic and look over the ponds.
Mooney said he felt wildlife trusts were mischaracterised by the government: “We aren’t saying let’s restore all of England back to nature. But there are clear maps that we can produce, and say: this is where nature can go, and therefore that’s where housing can go, rather than this wild west approach. Nature and housing can be woven together.”
He said he was worried the new rules would mean developments such as Kidbrooke would remain exceptions, and more badly considered developments with no nature involved would be built instead.
“There’ll be some developers who shall remain nameless, who are rubbing their hands with glee at what Rachel Reeves is saying, because they were never involved in the first place,” he said, “because they’re the greediest ones. They’re the ones that want to maximise their profit, densify everything, no consideration to the landscape, to the quality of life of the people who will actually live in the houses they are building.”
