A new town for the 21st century? Seven-village build to begin after 20-year journey

Gilston in Hertfordshire aims to be rebuke to cookie-cutter estates with network of 10,000 new homes within country parks and woodland

After two decades of legal wrangling and planning bottlenecks, the first bricks will finally be laid on a project being hailed by developers as the blueprint for the future of community building in Britain.

Gilston in east Hertfordshire will be transformed into a network of seven interconnected villages, comprising 10,000 new homes nestled within a sprawling 660-hectare (1,630-acre) landscape of country parks and woodland.

Greg Reed, the chief executive of Places for People (PfP), the social enterprise leading the development, said the timeline of the project served as a reminder of the sluggishness of the UK planning system.

“PfP’s journey with Gilston started at the same time my 20-year-old son was born,” Reed says. “I was thinking about all the things that have happened in his life … and it’s a bit depressing.”

Built on a former green belt site, the project’s acceleration followed a court of appeal ruling that dismissed a longstanding legal challenge from a landowner. With the judicial hurdles cleared, Gilston is being positioned not just as a housing development but as a rebuke to cookie-cutter estates that have dominated Britain’s suburban fringes.

The vision for Gilston is rooted in the garden town philosophy – a modern extension of Harlow in Essex, one of Britain’s original postwar new towns. Unlike traditional developments where infrastructure often follows housing as an afterthought, Gilston’s £1bn infrastructure budget is front-loaded.

Plans include two secondary schools, seven primary schools, health centres and leisure facilities. Crucially, the design rejects the car-centric model of the late 20th century. “We put the schools in the villages so that people can walk their kids or ride their bikes,” Reed says. “I love that space aspect. I live in Edinburgh, and whenever anything’s built, every square inch is built on. There’s no space.”

The scale of the project is immense. Each village will consist of between 800 and 1,800 homes, linked by 5 sq km (1.9 sq miles) of parks. PfP will deliver 8,500 of these homes, while Taylor Wimpey will construct the final 1,500 in the seventh village.

The project arrives at a critical moment for the UK government, which has promised to build 1.5m homes by 2029. While Gilston is not officially one of the government’s recently announced “12 new towns”, PfP says it serves as a live proof of concept for the model.

Reed is vocal about the need for national pressure to overcome local inertia. “In the past, when those sort of targets didn’t have any teeth, or were watered down, then everything kind of came to a halt because it’s very hard and very contentious,” he says.

He dismisses cynicism surrounding the government’s targets, comparing the housing crisis to a public health emergency: “If we said: ‘Hey, let’s try to cure cancer in five years’, would everyone be like: ‘Whoa. No way. Tell us you’re wrong’? Let’s go, let’s fund it, and let’s go.”

Gilston will be a “mixed tenure” format: of the initial 10,000 homes, at least 2,300 are designated as affordable. However, Reed emphasises that as a social enterprise, PfP intends to push that number higher as the project evolves over its projected 30-year build time.

“We want to create rural communities where there’s social housing, affordable housing, shared ownership and outright sales,” Reed says. He would like to see “tenure blind” design, where social housing is indistinguishable from private property. “In some communities, you can tell by the front doors what kind of housing it is. We’re painting them all the same colour. The idea is for no one to have any idea, and for everyone just to get on with their lives.”

While people will start to move into the site within the next few years, the whole project is likely to be completed in about 2050. “I will not be here when it’s finished,” Reed says. “But we’re sort of caretakers for these things. We’re going to be in that community … as a steward for decades to come.”

Even with planning and land secured, the industry faces a shortage of skilled labour. In response, PfP has launched a national training academy to fast-track tradespeople and planners. “People say: ‘Even if we had the money and the planning, we don’t have the skills.’ Well, so what? Get the skills,” Reed says.

As work at Gilston begins, it represents a £6bn boost to the UK economy and the creation of more than 2,000 permanent jobs. For a country mired in a housing shortage that has left 170,000 children in temporary accommodation, Gilston is more than just a construction site – it is a test of whether Britain can still build communities that last.