Daniel has been flying over the Wootton Road development. The land between the development and the Wootton Road has been levelled and placed outside a wooden fence.
The main entrance to the estate has been laid. Two houses have roofs and that white block looks like a sales office. The first homes are already becoming available. You can take a virtual tour at https://player.vimeo.com/video/566655790.
About half the area has not been worked on very much yet.
The estate is called Kings Gate. With a name like that it could be anywhere.
And have you seen the prices, minimum £459000 or a three bed and £559000 for a four.
I’m sure (!) that for that price they will have solar panels, individual electric car charging points, triple glazing and copious insulation and, of course, ground source heat pumps. Not long in house building terms before new energy regulations come in.
Perhaps it’s named after King Dick? (See next article.)
About 25 years ago I was asked by a foreign student, who was living with us, why new houses were designed to look like old ones. I explained that creative, innovative and forward looking architects were expensive, so the builders employed cheap ones.
The tragedy is that if you visit any of the architectural schools in this country you will see students producing exciting and innovative designs with full awareness of energy and environmental considerations. There are architectural practices that produce well designed and even beautiful housing at affordable prices, but straight lines and conventional schemes are quicker to build and produce a more immediate profit. And local planning departments are constrained by planning and building regulations which were knock the stuffing out of imagination.
The developers must be confident that their prices are going to attract the right buyers This development seems to be taking an age.
No apostrophe?
That really annoys me too. Feel like taking a red pen to it.
I have no doubt they could build the houses faster but at that price point, they are not going to sell fast. Especially as the housing market is going to slow down now the stamp duty holiday has ended.
Developers build the style of houses that people want to buy, and most people want to live in a traditional-looking
family house, not a modernist concrete box with a flat roof or a flashy design by a trendy young architect who thinks he knows better than ordinary folk.
As for prices, the Thames Valley is a very desirable place to live, with attractive historic towns like Abingdon, jobs for young professionals, and good transport links. We haven’t built nearly enough houses for the past decades, so of course prices are high – you can’t buck the market.
I wonder why ‘Kings Gate’ – guessing plucked from a hat? I thought these were going to be ‘affordable housing’? I’d rather spend my half million further away from the A34.