As you drive into the new town of Welborne, the dark green hoardings display pictures of logos featuring bees, CGI images showing a perfect town, and huge white letters spelling out its name - Welborne.
There are, of course, the promotional sayings. “A place you will be proud to call home,” says one.
The new town’s entry, off the roundabout on the way to Knowle the former mental asylum which closed and turned into an estate back in 1996, has two country gates to let visitors know they have left Knowle and are now entering Welborne, one of the largest towns to be built in Hampshire in decades.
The plans for this 6,000-home town began in 2008, and after years of to-ing and fro-ing, and some setbacks along the way, the first houses are now complete, and the show homes are welcoming visitors.
Right from the beginning, neighbouring towns and villages of Knowle, Wickham, Funtley, and Fareham have been worried about infill and about this once agricultural crop-growing land being replaced by an estate.
All along, the landowner, Southwick Estates, which owns vast swathes of countryside towards Portsmouth including the beautiful chocolate-box village of Southwick itself, has claimed that Welborne will not be another cheap housing estate. They said it would be a ‘garden village’ along the lines of Harwan or Hampstead, following garden village principles of being ‘well-designed,’ ‘high-quality,’ and ‘attractive.’
This was often scoffed at by protesters, who, at various stages of the application and its multiple inspections, took to protesting outside Fareham Borough Council offices with placards.
It was hard to imagine then, but now the plans are finally coming to life, and you can see the pond, the play park, and the first streets coming to life, it might not be that much of a stretch to think that actually, Welborne might not be such a bad place to live after all.
“The Thistlethwayte family has owned this land for 500 years, and they wanted to make sure that they left a legacy,” he said.
“It's been a long journey in terms of planning. You need deep pockets and be extremely strong-willed to be able to navigate the planning process.”
The site was identified by the Partnership for South Hampshire, a collaboration of 12 local authorities around the Solent, formerly known as PuSH, as a potential site for 10,000 houses back in 2008. However, it was not easy to ensure that all the land was available for that amount of housing. It was also not particularly welcomed by locals who felt that Whiteley, a relatively new town of 6,500 homes nearby, had gone far enough. Many other developers preferred to infill, John says.
“No one wanted to bite the bullet and build a big scheme of 6,000 or 10,000 houses, so you have got lots of infill development instead. The resistance to building these big towns is that people did not want the countryside to be urbanised, but what we have instead is infilled all these little bits; we have infilled all this area, but have not done it properly. There are no town centres, schools, or infrastructure that people need. When they started to talk about Welborne, the landowner was really keen not to do that. He said if we are to have this on the edge of our estate, let’s do things properly.”
Infrastructure such as rail connections, roads, schools, doctors, and dentists has all been planned for. A GP surgery will open in the village in 2028, and the first primary school will open soon after, in September of that year.
John said: “We have even been told to make sure we have got room for a vet, because when our landowner starts thinking about a new town, he thinks about places like Petersfield and Romsey and what they have got there. If we are to be as big as places like that, then we need to have the same facilities.”
As well as houses, builders are busy working away on another huge project next to the site.
One of the key parts of this site is that the motorway needs to be better connected. The old junction 10, which only allowed people to join and leave the M27 one way, was not going to be good enough to cope with this new town.
A huge feat of engineering will see them push a tunnel, 10,000 tonnes of concrete, under the motorway in just eight days, closing the motorway on Christmas Eve in order to get the job done.
Once that’s been completed, a chunk of land to the south of Welborne will be ‘unlocked’ and turned into Welborne Science and Technology Park. One million square feet of land will see huge warehouses built, hopefully opening up hundreds of jobs.
The land that Welborne sits on mainly falls to Fareham Borough Council, with a 79-acre woodland, called Dashwood, falling to Winchester City Council.
John said: “We will maintain the verges and trees. That gives us the ability to line the streets, unlike new developments, which don't have trees due to the costs associated with them. We have set up Welborne Garden Trust, a not-for-profit organisation. We have not signed up to a management organisation that fleeces you. It’s not for profit, created for Welborne people by Welborne people. We have to make sure that the organisation grows. It will make decisions. Each resident will own a share in the trust, and as that grows, they will have more of a say, until eventually, they will have control. A bit like having a parish council.”
As the assembled guests are shown around the site on our visit on June 5, and shown the show home, including the impressive immersive experience – a computer-generated scene that makes you feel like you are always walking its streets – it's clear to see that a lot of love, thought, effort, and money have been poured into this project.
Items found on the site during clearance, such as medieval and Bronze Age pottery, adorn the walls, and the point is made that a 53-metre Neolithic barrow that was discovered and will be built around proves that humans have been on this land for a very long time. Perhaps it has not always been the green fields that protesters once imagined it to be.
Fiona Gray, director of place for Buckland Development, said: “This is not just a housing estate; it’s a fully thought-through project.”
With eight homes sold, that leaves just 5,982 more to build and sell, and a whole range of infrastructure to put in, before Welborne turns into the legacy the Thistlethwaytes hope it will be, and a place that perhaps people will be proud to live.
