Hundreds of homes planned at former cattle market

A once-noisy market yard could soon be a neighbourhood of front gardens, school runs and late-night parcel vans. Hundreds of homes are planned here. Jobs, noise, life — and traffic, memories, trade. Which of those do we keep, and which do we trade away?

Dawn hangs like steam above the empty pens. Pigeons clatter from the old tin roof, and the chalk numbers on the concrete are only just visible, as if the past refuses to scrub off. A dog walker pauses at the rusted gate, where a fresh planning notice flaps, thin as skin in the breeze. I meet a retired stockman who still hears the gavel in his sleep, and a barista who sees a new café terrace where buyers once haggled over Charolais. The ground is shifting.

From livestock to living rooms

The plan, sketched across glossy boards in the town hall, sounds simple: turn a brownfield site into a place where people actually live. Two, three, maybe four hundred homes. A small square. A splash of river planting. Enough parking to keep tempers down, not so much that walking feels silly. It’s the melody many British towns hum now — use what’s already scarred, spare the fields.

In towns up and down the country, similar yards have shed their iron rails and put on red bricks and hedges. A couple in their thirties told me they moved into a former market plot last year, trading a studio above a takeaway for a small terrace and a tiny apple tree. Their bills dropped with the heat pump; their commute got slower but kinder. They still find cattle tags buried in the soil when it rains. Stories don’t leave, they just grow quieter.

What’s driving this push is a puzzle with familiar pieces: national housing targets, local plan deadlines, and the uneasy maths of viability. Brownfield land looks like an easy win, but it asks for heavy lifting — contamination checks, drainage fixes, access tweaks, heritage stitching. Developers bring numbers and glossy 3D blocks; councils bring policy and a long list of asks. Somewhere in the middle sits the life of a street: schools, buses, floodplains, trees, bins, light. That is where the scheme will stand or fall.

What this could mean for daily life

The best way to read a plan is to walk it. Stand where the new spine road would run and look left and right like you’re crossing the future. Count your steps from the proposed bus stop to the square. Imagine a pram, a rainy Tuesday, a dark December afternoon. If it feels close and legible on foot, it usually works on paper too.

When you scroll the documents, go in with a purpose. Pick three things to track: traffic, drainage, and where the first homes will actually rise. We’ve all had that moment when the drawings blur and the jargon numbs your brain. **Let’s be honest: nobody really does that every day.** So skim smart. Find the Phasing Plan. Find the Transport Assessment. Find the Section 106 list. Those pages tell you who gets what, and when.

Planners often say big schemes succeed on small details. Where the bin store sits. How a hedge turns a corner. Whether a crossing lines up with a desire line, not just a neat diagram. **This is where the future of the town will actually be decided.**

“Brownfield sites can heal a town’s fabric, but only if movement, memory and money hold hands,” says a planning consultant who’s seen three market yards turn into neighbourhoods and one stall for a decade.

• Check the affordable housing percentage and tenure mix.
• Look for safe routes to schools and the station, not just car access.
• Scan for Biodiversity Net Gain and long-term management plans.
• Ask when community spaces and shops arrive in the phasing, not just at the end.

What still hangs in the balance

Traffic is the first worry you hear at the café counter, and the last one to leave a council chamber. A hundred extra cars at the morning peak can jam a junction built for lorries, not school runs. The answer rarely sits in a spreadsheet alone. It lives in street widths, signal timings, buses that actually arrive, and the courage to drop a crossing where people already cross. The design either respects human habit, or it fights it all day.

Then there’s the market’s memory. A place where animals were traded carries weight. Keeping a section of the old ring, naming streets for drovers, giving the square a nod to the life it replaces — that matters more than you might think. Developers who thread that needle usually buy goodwill they can’t measure.

Money threads through every promise. Section 106 or CIL payments can build a classroom, upgrade a towpath, fit a signal. The trick is timing. If the first 100 homes arrive with no safe route to town, the scheme burns trust it can’t get back. Phasing is less a diagram than a pact between drawings and daily life.

And then, the climate lens. Heat pumps, PV panels, bat-friendly lighting, trees with room to grow — they push costs now and save costs forever. Streets that stay cool in July and unflooded in February are not extras. They’re the difference between a neighbourhood that works and one that frays under weather we no longer get to ignore.

The prize is big: a walkable place stitched to a town’s edge, where a Saturday market returns in a lighter form, and kids cycle to a friend’s house without three near-misses. The risk is also big: a car-led island with a supermarket glow and dead verges. Which way it tilts depends on what gets drawn this month and built next year. That hinge moment is here now, not in a glossy brochure a decade on.

FAQ :

• How many homes are we actually talking about?Plans point to several hundred, typically a mix of two-bed and three-bed houses with some flats around a small square. Final numbers shift with design tweaks and viability.
• Will any of them be affordable?Most councils push for 25–40% affordable by policy. The exact split — social rent, affordable rent, shared ownership — comes out in the legal agreement.
• What about traffic at the morning peak?Expect junction upgrades, new crossings and bus service contributions. The key test is whether safe walking and cycling routes arrive in the first phase, not last.
• Does the plan keep any of the old market?That’s on the table. Many schemes retain a fragment of ring wall, reuse brick, and weave in public art and street names that nod to the site’s past.
• How can I have my say?Comment through the council portal during the consultation window, attend drop-ins, and focus on specifics: access points, drainage, trees, and phasing. Clear, local evidence lands best.