One of the first new garden villages in a generation, enhanced with 21st Century technologies, thinking and ideas, and developed in harmony with existing communities and local culture.

West Carclaze Garden Village is a large mixed development with a focus on sustainable community living. The village will incorporate a new school, village centre with shops, cafes, medical facilities and other amenities, five lakes and around 16 miles of trails within a 350-acre country park.

This Eco-Community/Garden Village development has outline planning consent for 1,500 new homes comprising of a mix of market housing and affordable housing (including lifetime homes) and a potential for self-build properties. Phase 1 of 338 units plus local community centre, doctor’s surgery and retail facilities will be built on land within the former china clay workings of West Carclaze, to the north of St Austell, Cornwall. The timescale for building the Garden Village is around 15 years.

The objective of the development is to make best use of past kaolin extraction land and support a healthy and active new community through a development designed with green infrastructure at its heart.

Jubb are providing a full design service including civil, structural, geotechnical and transport advice to support the complex engineering development. Phase 1 of the development has commenced on site, with enabling works underway on future phases.

The past site use, involving mineral extraction and processing, has required extensive detailed desktop reviews of historic information combined with enhanced ground investigations required to develop appropriate earthworks and foundation planning conditions strategies. There has also been the need to undertake detailed design appraisals related to ground stability, contamination,
remediation and material management.

Dominant site features of the development are existing lakes which have historically been formed following past mine working. As part of the wider Garden Village development, these features have been embraced and incorporated to form a new country park. This has led to the opportunity to apply a sustainable drainage design led approach to the development, involving Jubb defining a site wide drainage strategy to efficiently manage surface water discharge.

Use of the past site features within the drainage strategy is a clear demonstration of where Jubb have been able to bring true added value to this project. The need and expense of below ground drainage has been reduced through use of surface level and open water design solutions commonly being adopted. Complex, challenging and rewarding design work has ultimately enabled a truly sustainable design to be created.

Careful and considered contact with Statutory Authorities such as the Lead Local Flood Authority (LLFA), the Environmental Agency (EA) and Highways has also been respected and applied throughout. This has involved us identifying and clearly defining approaches to design matters such as drainage strategies, the balance and re-use of site won materials (to avoid unnecessary cart-off) and the introduction of a new link to the A391 including traffic calming and traffic management measures. In-depth negotiations with the Local Authority has been provided through the provision of reports and mitigations, calculations and design so to satisfy planning conditions and design requirements to reach a successful conclusion.