Highfields Littleport Housing Development

The overall aim was to return the streets to the community, creating high quality spaces between the houses. It required innovative design ideas, realised through close collaboration between highway design engineers, architects, landscape consultants, planners and highway development control engineers.

Our design engineers wanted to produce a complete solution that would respond to the local environment and establish a sense of place and community. We created high quality communal spaces between houses for pedestrians and cyclists; employing non-regular street shapes and shared surfaces so that pedestrians and cyclists were given priority. We successfully incorporated features to deter unwanted access and parking by cars through design or street furniture. The streets were designed with minimum width to accommodate vehicle swept path of cars and emergency vehicles but making them attractive for pedestrians to use as well.

Landscape features softened the street scene, providing more attractive informal communal spaces to encourage social interaction. We incorporated Sustainable Urban Design (SUDS) and created wildlife habitat from all the surface water run-off.

This project demonstrates how innovative design ideas can be realised through collaborative working between highway design engineers, architects and landscape consultants working closely with the planners and highway development control engineers. The result has been a series of interesting high quality communal spaces between houses used freely by pedestrians and cyclists and through which low speed vehicles can pass; truly returning the streets to the community.

Our design engineers produced a complete solution that would respond to the local environment and establish a sense of place and community. The project proved to be an excellent example of what collaboration between specialist teams can achieve. We have worked seamlessly together with the clients consultants in design and implementation of the new neighbourhood, collaborating together to produce an innovative design which succeeded in its aim to return the streets to the community through provision of high quality communal spaces between the houses.

The project was built around a series of small works packages of improvement works, with the end result highly commended at the Institution of Civil Engineers’ (ICE) East Midlands Merit awards for the quality of design achieved and the benefits brought to people living there.