10 June 2013
A North Oxfordshire Council has agreed a price worth millions of pounds to purchase an area of land near Bicester, owned by the Ministry of Defence, to accommodate around 1000 self build homes.
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This ends months of rumours regarding the redevelopment of the Graven Hill site and comes after months of talks between Cherwell District Council and the Government. The Council will now spend the rest of the summer formalising the purchase agreement.
Full details of what is planned may take many weeks and months to come to light, with master planning to gauge levels of demand to follow. Specific sites for self build are unlikely to be made available until well into 2014.
Debbie Pickford, Cherwell’s lead member for housing, said the site was an “absolutely brilliant” opportunity for Bicester. Ms Pickford indicated that the council was very keen to replicate the approach adopted at the huge self build project undertaken at Almere in The Netherlands. “This is the kind of model that we’d like to bring to the UK. If the Government and everybody else do not get out of the clutches of the huge developers, we will never get house prices down,” she added.
The council cannot divulge the precise cost for the purchase of the site, but has confirmed that it will explore funding options, with the possibility of dipping into its reserves.
Self building at University
Elsewhere, the University of Cambridge has set aside land to accommodate self build homes as part its £1 billion mixed-use scheme at North West Cambridge, which will incorporate 3,000 new homes in total. There will be 27 self build plots available at the latter stages of phase one (from 2016) within the master plan for the development. The university is currently seeking housing developers to work on the scheme.
