The image is a visualisation, not a photograph. The affordable homes carry the same stone, the same stone-slate roofs and the same detailing as the market homes; nothing on the street says which is which.
The full story
Chipping Campden sits at the north edge of the Cotswolds AONB, and its planning history reads accordingly. An earlier, larger scheme on this land had been refused. The outline for 30 homes was refused too, in June 2016, then allowed at appeal in November 2017 as major development in a national landscape, with the council's own officers having recommended refusal. That history set the temperature for everything that followed.
Lagan Homes bought the site carrying that consent. What they owned was a permission in principle with the detail reserved: no approved layout, no approved house types, and a council entitled to examine both against the full weight of Cotswold design policy. In May 2018 they appointed Rickett Architects as architect and planning agent to carry the scheme from that position to homes on the ground.
The Reserved Matters submission went in that December, covering layout, appearance, scale and landscaping. The council's first consultation response tested it hard: objections on layout, on drainage, and above all on house types that were not yet, in the council's words, suited to Campden and this site. A developer's standard range is refined for volume sites; almost none of it met the Cotswold vernacular unchanged.
So the summer of 2019 became a redesign. Roof pitches moved to 47.5 degrees. Dormers were pulled back into the roofspace and re-clad in render in place of lead. Gable-end windows went; stone heads and cills, centred openings and chimneys came back. The most prominent front-gabled type was redesigned almost completely. The package was resubmitted as one coordinated response, and on 7 August 2019 the council approved it, a determination held together under repeated extensions of time rather than won once and banked.
Drainage ran on its own track. The surface-water strategy was found insufficient, and we coordinated the rework with the civil engineer: soakaways, exceedance flow routes and the maintenance regime behind them, approved in July 2019. Highways ran alongside: the new access off Dyers Lane with its visibility splays, carriageway and footway widths, refuse-vehicle tracking, and the S38 and S278 packages with the county highway authority.
Then the conditions, across four discharge applications: the landscape and ecological management plan, the construction method statement, tree protection, and the materials conditions that make the AONB real, one-metre-square stone and brick sample panels built and signed off on site, window reveals at least 75 millimetres deep, no bargeboards, no fascias. The first COVID lockdown landed in the middle of that programme, and the programme did not stop.
Underneath the planning story we were drawing the scheme for construction: working-drawing packages for every house type, superstructure sets, the materials palette, construction-phase site plans and plot setting-out, and the stream of site queries that carries any development from the first foundation to the last sale. Our role ran from RIBA Stage 3 to Stage 5.
What stands off Dyers Lane now is Jubilee Gardens: thirty Cotswold homes, fifteen of them affordable and none of them distinguishable from the street, built and sold by Lagan Homes on land the planning record still calls The Leasows. A contested permission in a protected landscape, turned into a place that looks as though it was always going to be there.
