Since responding to the application, we have watched the number of responses grow with virtually all being critical of the traffic implications but also expressing other concerns such as flooding, capacity to deliver utilities such as fresh water, sewage, electricity and so on. Several also worry about the demands which will be placed on adjacent communities until the new estate is ’up and running’. This means pressure on our school places, our health services and shopping. (Although, since we have neither doctor nor surgery, we will be competing for time at the already overloaded Merrow Park Surgery.

All the utilities and public bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Highways England expressed reservations about the plans, and many of these were about the money to required to create sufficient infrastructure.

Local building in the area

Recently, two new houses were built on the elbow bend of London Road and Merrow Lane. This focused attention on the challenges of sending construction traffic up these residential roads.  Parked vans obstructed sightline for the bend, and blocked the pavement on some days, and spread detritus around the road and pavement. Over a third of residents of these two roads wrote in about their anxieties if two houses became 1800 houses. What kind of inconvenience would that construction traffic create? We therefore write to the planning department about these concerns and our letter was added to the pile of considerations about Gosden Hill.

A change of name

Martin Grant Homes have adapted their name to Martin Grant Land which is a sure signal that the site will be parcelled into segments and sold off to individual builders.  This is reasonably common practice, but it does underline the need for coherent plans and phasing. For example, we need flood defences in place at the outset before water starts flowing downhill from the building site into Burpham, but currently, this will happen in phases delivered at different times.

Input into the Section 106 discussion

Section 106 is the agreement between the council and the developer about who pays for what and especially what needs to be done to make the development possible and tolerable for adjacent existing communities – that’s us! We wanted to express our opinions about what we need. An open meeting in January discussed our options but we decided to run with the priorities that had been expressed to us in public meetings, namely, the mitigation of traffic congestion, flooding and the need to improve capacity in Burpham to cater for incoming residents. Here is the full letter:

I am writing to convey the views of Burpham residents about the ways the 106 agreement can be shaped to mitigate negative effects on our community. We understand that there is not a formal consultation, but we hope you will take the strongly-felt needs of our community into account as you negotiate with the developers.

The views below have been collected over several large meetings, via the input of the executive committee and in discussion with the neighbourhood most affected at the Gosden Hill end of Burpham. It has been written in a particular sequence to help you weigh the relative priority placed on them by the community.

1. Our enduring top priority is the mitigation of traffic flowing between the estate and Burpham. Within this,
2. The most-mentioned mitigation is the need for an all-ways junction from the estate onto the A3, providing additional ingress and egress routes without forcing more traffic through Burpham.
3. The second most expressed need is to revise the route into Phase 1 so that it does not go through inappropriate residential roads, but directly from the A3. Since this is offered in later phases, we hope that a way can be found to bring this forward without immense cost.
4. Many residents think that a second exit from the estate to the south would help to alleviate the threat of extreme traffic congestion in Burpham. The developer did include a southern exit in a previous draft, but deleted it in the final version. There may be alternative routes to consider heading towards Merrow or Clandon, for example, but there is deep aversion to funnelling all traffic down through London Road.
5. Many residents are keen to restore the railway station for the benefit of commuters (towards London) and shoppers (towards Guildford) though there is residual anxiety about additional cars making their way through Burpham to the station.

We note that many of these measures were specified in the Infrastructure Delivery Plan which forms Appendix 6 of the Local Plan. Our hope is that this letter will encourage the planning department to pursue their original requirements with vigour. For us, mitigating traffic congestion in Burpham should be an urgent issue in your negotiations. 

• The mitigation of surface flood water from the site is the second most-urgent view expressed about Gosden Hill. We are grateful to colleagues dealing with flooding and environment that the issues at Merrow Stream are well-recognised, and that they have heard our anxieties about surface water coming off the building site before the attenuation ponds are created, and are seeking to put early mitigations in place as a priority.

• Our final set of concerns is about how Burpham will meet the increased demand for its amenities and services e.g. healthcare, social opportunities, school places and more until new facilities in the estate are operational.

Our clearest priorities on this matter:

• Access to a doctors’ surgery. Healthcare has always been a high priority for local residents and we agree with the council that the doctors’ surgery specified in the Infrastructure Delivery Plan is essential. May I remind you that Burpham has no doctors’ surgery? The New Inn Surgery closed some time ago and has not been replaced. The new surgery needs to be built early on and placed near our borders to relieve the pressure on Merrow Park Surgery.
• Increasing community capacity. As homes begin to fill on Gosden Hill, residents will need an organisation to welcome and integrate them into the local community. Burpham Community Association is keen to fulfil this function by inviting them to activities and providing them with a voice in local affairs. We are a self-sufficient self-funding organisation of volunteers with a large and varied programme of lectures, walks, discussion groups, family events and meetings. We lack a permanent home for small meetings, storage and administration. If we had one, we could easily include and expand our reach to support the Gosden Hill community as it establishes itself.
• Improving safety on adjacent roads.  Merrow Lane will see increases in traffic as soon as work starts. It lacks a pavement and the alternative pathways though Burpham Woods have suffered from tree-fall and overgrowth since Covid. The Village Pond needs clearing, and walking ways need to be revived to make the journey between Gosden Hill and Burpham viable for pedestrians, cyclists and recreational walkers. Even without a second exit, porosity between Gosden Hill and Burpham would encourage active travel – but it just isn’t there at the moment.

We support the effort to build homes here if ways can be found to respect the needs of our community, and we thank you for the reassuring comments that have been made and the diligent efforts of your staff.

Aligning with the new local plan

The BCA attended a consultation workshop run by Guildford Council about the planning challenges which lie ahead as the government injects urgency into the rather long process of forward-planning and which has high expectations about how many houses can be built.

This was a listening exercise and many familiar themes emerged from the community organisations represented – traffic congestion, conserving green spaces, affordable homes, developing with climate change in mind, and so on.

This is an awkward moment to be developing a local plan when a new unitary authority is due to replace both Guildford Borough Council and Surrey County Council. West Surrey will eventually have its own plan and how the old and new plans merge or supplant each other is still unknown. Much will depend on the attitude of newly-elected councillors, government pressure to build new homes, and the availability of resources.

At the same time, we have started updating our Burpham Neighbourhood Plan and we are not yet sure how we will align it sensibly with the local plan when we are moving along a parallel track. 

One thing that is illuminating, however, is a prompt by the government to continue planning exercises and regard planning more as an evolution and constant re-evaluation to prepare for the future – in other words, an ongoing upgrading of the plan in the light of emergent needs. In this version, having different layers of planning at different stages in the cycle is just part of this process of reflection and revision.