We have been shortlisted as Small Planning Consultancy of the year for the Royal Town Planning Institute Awards 2020. The RTPI Awards for Planning Excellence are the longest-running awards in our industry and we are honoured to be shortlisted alongside some excellent small consultancies – tough competition! We won back in 2015 and would be…
Author: admin
Building Better, Building Beautiful: Yes, but not quite!
The report of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission is now out and there’s some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the good news, and hold your breath about that word ‘beauty’ that we Brits are almost embarrassed to use (though we seem happy with ‘ugly’). Rather than starting off the…
Maps, Books and Collaborative Planning
Giving communities a greater voice in all areas of planning is a key theme for Place Studio. More and better community engagement is, in our view, crucial in strategic plan-making as well as development management (through pre-application engagement). It is also central to neighbourhood planning. We have promoted both the principle and practice of genuine…
Neighbourhood Planning and the Revised NPPF
We have been familiarising ourselves with the recently updated National Planning Policy Framework, especially in relation to Neighbourhood Planning. We are pleased to see the importance of Design Quality being reinforced, with the NPPF highlighting that ‘Neighbourhood plans can play an important role in identifying the special qualities of each area and explaining how this…
Your Neighbourhood Plan is ‘made’! It’s the end of the beginning…
Once made, a Neighbourhood Plan becomes part of the planning authority’s suite of Local Development Documents. In principle, this gives any Neighbourhood Plan as much status in determining applications as the Local Plan. The hard work, examination and referendum are over and your community now has a made Neighbourhood Plan – well done! But that is not the end;…