Mill Green Village shortlisted for the RTPI East of England Awards

We are delighted to announce that Mill Green Village has been shortlisted at the RTPI East of England Awards for Planning Excellence 2024 in the category “Best Project – Excellence in Planning for Communities (small schemes under 50 homes)”.

The initial target of the project was: bring the Green Man pub back to life. The challenge was how to do this in a way that was viable on a highly-constrained site that offered few easy solutions. This was achieved in 2023 through a project whose cornerstone was engagement and collaboration.

It emerged, in 2010, with a request from the community to the Gascoyne Estate to purchase and save the Green Man pub. This led to the 2011 Mill Green Charrette: bringing friends and residents of Mill Green, and wider stakeholders, into the design process immediately and setting the groundwork for collaborative, open and transparent communication. The Charrette raised deeper concerns beyond the pub which the project then also sought to address: no social meeting space, poor street lighting, noise from the A414, inaccessible green space.

Beginning with this extensive community engagement, we developed a complex planning application that received unanimous public support – remarkable within Hertfordshire’s Green Belt. Proposals needed to accord with the historic environment, to demonstrate the very exceptional circumstances to overcome a presumption against development, and incorporate designs that responded to environment, location and topography (e.g. MVHR systems responding to the noise of the A414 road).

To know more about the project click here.

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