The listed farmhouse cluster at the centre of the site, with the working tree farm around it and the Birmingham skyline on the horizon. The city on the skyline is the point: this is an edge, not open countryside.
The full story
A private landowning family owned Woods Farm, a working Christmas tree farm on the southern edge of Shirley in Solihull, bounded by the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal to the south and a mainline railway to the west. The whole holding sits in the West Midlands Green Belt, where new building is restricted on principle, so the land is worth broadly what can credibly be built on it, and not much more.
Solihull, though, faced a large and contested housing requirement. The Greater Birmingham Housing Market Area Strategic Growth Study had placed a substantial obligation on the borough, one that could only be met by releasing Green Belt land through the Local Plan Review. Land at Shirley had been identified as one of the sustainable locations capable of taking it.
The family appointed us in 2022 to answer the question that sets a strategic site's value: how much development can this land credibly support, and how do you build the architectural and design case that persuades a council to plan for it?
Two things made it a demanding site. The first was the Green Belt itself: the case for release had to be argued through the Local Plan Review, on land the council had to be satisfied was sustainable, deliverable, and capable of holding its separation from the settlements around it. The second was that the site was defined by its edges and its features, and each of them shaped what could go where.
Whitlocks Farmhouse, a seventeenth century timber framed house, is Grade II listed and stands within the site. Rather than write off the land around it, the masterplan made it a driver, setting the farmhouse in a green buffer that became part of the scheme's green infrastructure. The canal to the south is the long accepted edge of Dickens Heath, and the council required a minimum three hundred metre separation between Shirley and Dickens Heath; the plan used the canal as the defensible edge and the existing hedgerows to hold the gap. The mainline railway on the western boundary needed an acoustic landscape buffer, which doubled as native planting and biodiversity gain. The site sits in Flood Zone 1 with the potential for an exemplar sustainable drainage scheme, and its four existing accesses onto Bills Lane had to be resolved into one coherent movement strategy, which the masterplan carries as two new three-arm roundabouts designed by the highway engineer.
Working as lead architect and masterplanner at RIBA Stages 1 and 2, we produced the pre-application document and a design code preparation framework to carry the site's promotion. The pre-application document set out the full site appraisal, flood risk, ecology and arboriculture, landscape and visual impact, heritage, access and movement, and planning policy, and made the evidenced case for the site's capacity.
The masterplan leads with green infrastructure as its first move, not an afterthought. A continuous biodiversity corridor crosses the site from the open land in the east to the canal in the south, linking new public open space to a canal-side marina and junior sports pitches. Existing mature hedgerows and tree lines are kept as the boundaries between nine development parcels, and the listed farmhouse sits within a green buffer that ties the eastern bridleway to the canal. The parcels sit at a consistent 35 dwellings per hectare, tested at 429 homes with the case made for up to 460, while the strategic capacity agreed with the council's highways team, through joint modelling with the other site promoters, was up to 750 dwellings.
Around the design, we worked with the planning consultant and the council to settle a defensible development boundary on the ground, and made the case for a central spine-road movement structure, so the parcels and green corridors could be organised around one legible network. Alongside the masterplan we prepared the design code, setting the twelve principles a full code would carry, and coordinated the consultant team across heritage, transport, landscape, structural and drainage engineering, and planning.
This is a site-promotion project. Our role was to build the architectural and design case, not to secure a planning consent, and it is that case, the masterplan and the evidence behind it, that carried the site forward as a proposed allocation in the Local Plan Review. Our involvement was the masterplanning and design code through to late 2023.
On a strategic site, this is where the value is created: in the masterplan and the case behind it, long before anything is built. It fixed the site's capacity, its access strategy and its green framework, and it did so without compromising the setting of the listed farmhouse, the separation between Shirley and Dickens Heath, or the character of the canal corridor. That is what lets a council plan for the land at all.
