Derwenthorpe: a model village for the 21st Century

As someone with a passion for housing design, I was hugely excited to have the opportunity to visit Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Derwenthorpe development in York.

I was part of a delegation from the Matrix Partnership, a group of housing associations (including Trident Group for whom I am a board member) that work collaboratively to deliver housing across the Midlands. In order to ensure that our schemes are at the forefront of sustainable community development, we regularly seek to take opportunities to learn from UK and European best practice to influence our work.

Derwenthorpe has received significant attention in the housing sector for its design quality, partnership approach to delivery and its sustainable principles and thus provided an ideal opportunity for us to collectively be inspired and identify learning points for us to take away.

To provide a brief background to the Derwenthorpe scheme:

• Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, the registered social housing provider arm of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is the scheme’s developer, with David Wilson Homes engaged as the scheme’s construction partner and Richard Partington Architects providing architectural design.
• Derwenthorpe will comprise over 500 homes upon completion: 317 homes for sale (c.59%), 135 for social rent (c.25%) and 82 for shared ownership (c.15%).
• The scheme had a strong, defined vision from the outset. The intention was for the scheme to excel in environmental and social sustainability and to create a benchmark that would influence the future development of similar communities, in particular that of volume housebuilders.

Some specific design features that were of particular interest are set out below:

Movement:

• The masterplan identifies four key quarters / phases, bisected by Sustrans route 66 and connected via pedestrian routes, but with no through vehicle traffic: a feature designed to discourage unnecessary trips by vehicle and encourage movement on foot and by bicycle.
• Sustainable transport initiatives trialled by the scheme include a residents’ car club, three months’ free bus travel and cycle vouchers. Simultaneously, the scheme provides an average 1.1 parking spaces per property (low by suburban development standards), to attempt to reduce car ownership.
• The street hierarchy was carefully considered with perimeter ‘green lanes’ to each phase designed with a landscape bund to outer edge to prevent parking.
• Shared surface homezones are designed to front of houses with opportunity to temporarily drop off, with parking located to rears of properties to minimise impact on street.

Public realm and landscape:

• 18 of the site’s 52 acres are given over to landscape (35%), which is moderately high when compared with volume housebuilder schemes.
  Public realm design shows strong attention to detail, from well detailed streetscapes to a bespoke LAP within each phase and attractive central areas of parkland with play and exercise equipment.
• Suds, swales and underground pipes have been implemented for on-site drainage, allowing the site to assist the wider environment in preventing flash flooding (as demonstrated by the site’s capacity to assist with reducing the impact of a 1 in 10,000 year flood incident on neighbouring land).

Building design:

• Architectural design takes strong cues from the local environment in terms of materials and detailing, including long, sloping rooflines and painted brickwork.
• Code for Sustainable Homes level 4 was achieved by the first phase, with later phases restricted purely to energy performance standards.
  Biomass district heating and PV panels have been used for on-site generation.
• High quality design standards have been demonstrably welcomed by residents through empirical satisfaction surveys.

Analysis:

As an urban designer, I was inspired by the visit to Derwenthorpe. It provides an exceptional example of housing design – and moreover of community creation. Having the opportunity to speak to a resident of the scheme as well as members of the JRHT team as part of our visit was particularly useful in providing a holistic appreciation of the scheme’s merits.

Derwenthorpe is not perfect and to their immense credit, Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust’s team were very open about areas of underperformance against their expectations, including energy performance and appealing to the widest spectrum of their residents through their outreach programmes. For Matrix as a housing delivery partnership, this transparency and willingness to share lessons learnt which are not to be repeated, is in many ways as useful as the provision of best practice exemplars.

From a personal perspective, as an urban designer working with social housing providers and private sector housebuilders alike, the scheme provides an exceptional case study of masterplanning, architectural design and landscape design that responds sensitively to its existing environment.

Architecturally, the materials and detailing that reference the local environment provided a strong sense of place. I found the creation of winter gardens and balconies as aspects of the private space within properties an interesting and visually appealing (not to mention space efficient) alternative to larger rear gardens. These features will also animate the streetscene and promote greater community interaction.

This is compounded through the high quality design of areas of public open space, with play features and exercise equipment that aim to promote greater standards of health and wellbeing among residents – and the wider community, who are actively encouraged to visit Derwenthorpe by JRHT.

From a masterplanning perspective, I was particularly interested in the movement network, the hierarchy of streets and the way that the detailed specification of street widths, use of landscape bunds to discourage parking and the resolution of private parking (with homezone drop-off and rear parking courts with carport structures) ensured the creation of a public realm that is demonstrably designed for people, not cars – something that is paramount in our thinking here at Node.

In summary, there is much to learn from Derwenthorpe as an example of best practice – and there is equally much to learn from Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust as an example of an organisation that is willing to share its triumphs and its areas to improve upon, in a bid to enhance knowledge in the wider industry, increase housing delivery and ultimately improve the lives of people across the country.