A new train station, affordable homes, a reservoir, England's largest nature reserve and thousands of jobs—what Forest City means for Haverhill.
“Reflecting on the vision and the opportunities the Forest City could bring, it is clear there is significant potential for Haverhill and the wider region. While any proposal of this scale deserves careful scrutiny, the possible benefits are too important to ignore, and we owe it to future generations to have an open, balanced and constructive conversation.”
Are you a Haverhill resident? We're hosting co-design sessions just for Haverhillians—and we want to hear from you.
Share Your ThoughtsForest City is a plan for Britain's first new city in over 50 years—a city of up to a million people, built over 30 years on 45,000 acres of land between Haverhill and Newmarket.
It is not a housing estate. It's a complete city, planned properly from day one: 400,000 affordable homes, a 12,000 acre nature reserve (the largest in England), a 1,600 acre reservoir/lake you can swim in, four new hospitals, a tram network, and a new train station at Haverhill connecting to Cambridge and London.
Haverhill sits right at the edge of it. Today, Haverhill is one of the largest towns in Britain without a train station, passed over by successive governments while Cambridge gets the investment. Forest City puts Haverhill at the centre of the story instead: the jobs, the training colleges, the healthcare, and the transport links arrive on its doorstep, starting years before the first home is even built.
The plan is privately funded. We will spend the next few years developing the masterplan, which will then be examined publicly through the Government's Strategic Planning process. If approved, a government-owned development corporation would build the city—the same model that delivered Canary Wharf and the Olympic Park.
Cambridge is one of the most important cities in Europe. It's receiving huge investment, seeing massive growth, and is struggling to keep up with demand.
We've spoken to many household-name businesses and start-ups alike that are having to leave Cambridge for other parts of Britain or even other countries, because they can't get office/lab space, and their employees can't get homes with less than a 1.5hr commute.
Located next to Cambridge—which itself has produced more Nobel Prizes than all of France—on the way to Felixstowe, packed full of brilliant, hard-working, passionate people, Haverhill is very strategically placed.
The truth is, we're not the only ones that have noticed. The Greater Cambridge Development Corporation plans to build 150k homes including along the A1307, reaching all the way to the outskirts of Haverhill. There won't be a new reservoir, a new hospital, or a new train station. There will just be new cookie-cutter homes to share the same roads, with zero consideration of what the people of Suffolk need or want.
And combined, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and North Essex have been tasked with building 340k homes in the next 25 years—again, these will be delivered piecemeal, without infrastructure, without central planning, and without including Haverhill in the story.
Forest City will change Haverhill, that's for sure. We believe it changes it like this: a town of 27,000 becomes the gateway to a city of a million, with a train station, a hospital on its doorstep, training colleges, and tens of thousands of new customers within a few miles of its high street. Haverhill's businesses gain a market twenty times their current size. Haverhill's young people gain somewhere to live without leaving.
The alternative is not "no change." If Forest City doesn't happen, the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation plans 150,000 homes, many along the A1307—more pressure on the same roads, the same GP surgeries, and the same water supply, with no station, no hospital, and no say for Haverhill.
There are real open questions—about the high street, about local businesses—and we want Haverhill to answer them, not us. That's why we're hosting a series of co-design sessions just for Haverhillians: for the first time, Haverhill in the driver's seat rather than having things done to it by Cambridge and Suffolk.
No one's home needs to be destroyed for Forest City. All existing villages like Cowlinge, Great Thurlow, and Withersfield will be protected—surrounded by trees and supported in retaining their own culture, identity, and way of life.
These villages will, over the next 30 years, become like Hampstead is in London, or Grantchester is in Cambridge—a village within a city.
We expect Haverhill's house prices to increase both before and during construction. Building the city will require tens of thousands of people of varying skillsets—from surveying to construction, from ecologists to electricians, from planners to teachers.
Given the vast number of people and skillsets, we have various questions to answer in the next couple of years, including:
Forest City will create new jobs, new education facilities, new transport links, and new healthcare facilities—all before anything even starts being built.
Haverhill is strategically located to benefit from all of this, and homes will become more in-demand, not less.
The people Britain's housing market has failed.
The 32-year-old software engineer paying £2,000 a month for a one-bed in London, the Cambridge scientist priced out of the city where she works. The young couple who've done everything right and still can't start a family, the Haverhill kids who currently have to leave the town they grew up in to find a home of their own.
Around them, everyone a real city needs: artists (who thrive when rents are affordable), teachers, retirees (who benefit from far cheaper retirement homes), founders, and families. Around 30% of homes will be for rent, so the city works at every stage of life, not just for buyers.
No. Compulsory Purchase Orders are not a tool to use lightly, and they can only be used in certain cases. CPOs may well be used on fields, woodland, and non-inhabited land. But existing homes will be integrated into the city—we're trying to build homes, not destroy them.
Given the central government is forcing the region to build 340k homes over the next 25 years, Forest City will actually reduce the amount of farmland that will be built on.
The default way Britain builds homes is by urban sprawl around existing villages and towns—smearing the construction and destruction across as many areas as possible, all so the developers don't need to build infrastructure.
Currently, sprawling developments typically take up 15 dwellings per hectare (dph). Because Forest City will be properly planned next to areas of employment, and also come with public transport including a tram network, Forest City homes can be built closer together (think the terraced streets of Cambridge, Bath and London). This way we use 3x less land per home. We've calculated that 340,000 'development as normal' homes over the next 25 years would consume at least 56k acres of greenfield land. Subtracting 13.5k acres of new woodland and the lake, Forest City would be using only 31.5k acres as built-on land. So because cities can fit vastly more people in a smaller footprint than village extensions ever could, Forest City would save the East of England around 21.5k acres of prime farmland.
The opposite. Forest City includes a 12,000 acre nature reserve, which would be the single largest land-based nature reserve in England.
This isn't the usual developer routine of bulldozing a site and planting a few saplings around the edges. The plan works with what's already there: every acre of existing woodland is kept and protected. Ancient hedgerows, trees and woodland soil are preserved without exception. Lost woodland, ponds, and wetlands will be restored to a baseline from the year 1880. The River Stour runs through the reserve with a 100 metre buffer either side. Beavers, storks, and otters will be reintroduced to a landscape that was once theirs only a few generations ago. Any trees or hedgerows that have to be removed will be replaced with plantings that provide the same carbon, ecological and ecosystem benefits within 10 years.
And unlike the vague biodiversity promises that come with most developments, these standards will be legally enforceable through Nature Covenants, with targets negotiated with Natural England: Local Nature Reserve standard within 5 years, National Nature Reserve within 10, SSSIs within 25. If we miss them, we can be held to account in law.
East Anglia is one of the driest regions in Britain, and water is the most legitimate constraint on growth around Cambridge. It's also why Forest City is designed around water from day one, rather than treating it as someone else's problem like typical developers do.
At the centre of the city is a 1,600 acre reservoir, providing over half the city's water needs, alongside being a lake to swim and boat in and a home for nature. Britain hasn't completed a major new reservoir in over 30 years; Forest City will build one as core infrastructure, connected into Anglian Water's strategic network for resilience. Every home is built to modern water efficiency standards with reuse and sustainable drainage designed in, so residents use a fraction of the water of the average British household.
Compare the alternative: 340,000 homes scattered across the region as village extensions, each drawing on the same strained rivers and chalk aquifers, with developers left without responsibility for building new water supply.
We do think it's awful that Haverhill is one of the largest towns in the country without a train station—particularly given Bury St. Edmunds, a town of similar size, does have one. Cambridge just had £250m spent on its new station.
This said, the Treasury doesn't make decisions based on fairness—they make them based on spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there currently isn't enough of a business case to justify building more infrastructure for Haverhill.
Forest City changes this dynamic quite significantly. We expect Haverhill to become the most strategic point in the run-up to, and during, construction of the city. This will bring new jobs, a hospital on its doorstep, training colleges, investment, and yes—a train station.
A brand new 4-bed home with all the mod-cons, water & energy efficiency, and fantastic connectivity in Forest City will cost £350k to buy—as close to cost-price as we can make it.
This is possible because Forest City removes the two biggest costs baked into every home in the South East: land value speculation and planning risk. Buyers own their home; the Community Land Trust owns the land beneath it. And because homes can only be sold back to the city, the discount can't be flipped for profit. It's passed on, permanently, to the next generation.
The city will, of course, contain homes of different sizes comparably priced—1-bed, 2-beds, etc. We choose to focus on the 4-bed house because a large part of our mission is to enable young people to have families again. The lack of affordable 4-bed homes is a large contributor to birth-rate decline in Britain.
Around 30% of homes will be for rent, so the city works for people at every stage of life, not just buyers.
Because scale is what pays for infrastructure. This is the single most misunderstood thing about property development in modern Britain.
A 2,000-home development can't fund a train station. A 10,000-home development can't fund a hospital or a reservoir. That's why Haverhill, after decades of piecemeal growth, has none of these things—every scheme was individually too small to justify them, so the developers built houses and left.
A city of a million people flips the equation. At that scale, a railway, a reservoir, hospitals, a tram network, and a 12,000 acre nature reserve all become affordable—funded by the value the city creates rather than by taxpayers. Britain used to understand this: it's how the Victorians built, and it's why we're proposing one properly planned city as an alternative to 340,000 homes smeared across the East of England as village extensions that fund nothing.
Building small is how you get all of the housing with none of the benefits.
Thirty years of building is a serious undertaking, and we won't pretend otherwise. But the sequencing matters.
Infrastructure comes first—rail links, roads, and utilities are built before the homes, which means construction materials increasingly move by rail rather than by lorry through villages. Construction traffic will be routed on dedicated haul roads away from existing villages and the A1307.
This said, the construction years are also the opportunity years. Building the city needs tens of thousands of people—surveyors, ecologists, electricians, planners, teachers. For the towns and villages nearby, the disruption will come along with jobs, investment, and the arrival of the station and hospital.
Every listed building keeps its full legal protection—a development corporation has no power to change that, and we wouldn't want it to. Churches, halls, and historic buildings within the area will be integrated into the city with their settings respected, as they were when villages like Hampstead were absorbed into London.
Archaeology gets more attention with Forest City, not less. Much of this land has never been professionally surveyed—whatever lies under the plough soil has sat unexamined for centuries and is degraded a little more each year by agriculture. Before construction, the entire site will need to undergo systematic archaeological survey and recording, likely the largest such programme in the East of England's history. What's found will be preserved, recorded, and displayed in the city itself.
The Community Land Trust is part of the scheme to solve a specific problem: the city will sell homes well below market prices—to make them actually affordable—instead of optimising to make as much money from homes as possible.
The risk here is that a bunch of "investors" come along and buy the homes cheaply, then re-sell them for twice the price—making money for themselves and effectively stealing the discount that is intended for future generations.
So to solve this, each home is sold with a covenant—if you want to sell one of these new homes, you must sell it back to the city as buyer of first resort at a valuation decided by the CLT (governed by residents). Typically, CLTs publish a valuation formula which includes inflation, gradual normalisation with market rates, and some discretionary amount based on improvements that have been made to the home since it was bought.
Of course, if the city declines to buy back the home, it can be sold on the open market.
This is up to the residents, who will become custodians of this legacy left for future generations.
We expect at least 100 years, but it could perhaps go on even longer. It depends how Victorian our descendants feel.
We expect the Government to establish a development corporation for the project—this development corporation will be fully owned and governed by the government itself, who will then appoint people to run it, tasked with effectively implementing the masterplans we provide.
The building of homes, offices, infrastructure, and more will be sub-contracted out to construction firms. This is different to how most development works, where a house building company buys land to build homes and the minimum possible infrastructure in order to make their margins as large as possible.
We don't intend to submit a planning application—there isn't a planning authority that is appropriate. The Government has introduced a new process for large strategic projects like Forest City, called Strategic Planning. As the first part of this process, we will be publishing a high-level Spatial Development Strategy in late 2026. This document will cover how Forest City could impact other regional projects and political jurisdictions.
We expect to follow the Strategic Planning process, which will require the benefits and drawbacks of the scheme to be publicly examined, in due course.
We expect to follow the Strategic Planning process, which was created by the Government precisely to enable this type of project. The process will mean the project's details will be examined publicly and democratically.
No, and it would be strange if there were government backing yet. We haven't asked. Here's the order things happen in: £250m of private planning, public scrutiny, then and only then a decision on a development corporation.
As we've laid out in our report and delivery overview, we expect a development corporation to be established some time in 2029.
In 2030, the core pieces of infrastructure will begin to be built—including the nature reserve, a hospital, trainlines and stations, a reservoir, and a power station. Shortly after this, home and office construction will begin. To build the city to its full potential will likely take 30 years from this point.
We do expect to begin establishing further education in the region before 2029—a college to train people in the many hundreds of skills that construction and operation of Europe's first city in 50 years will need.
We are doing this because Britain as a whole has a big problem—it's impossible for most young people to buy a home and have children. There are many causes of this, from not enough housing being built, to not enough economic growth (salaries have grown slower in Britain than in the US).
We're not developers—we're not trying to make money from building homes, or land banking, or planning flipping.
Shiv's background is in investigative journalism and campaigning for inter-generational fairness. Joe's background is in software engineering, AI, and campaigning for things that will make Britain richer.
We (ACDC Ltd.) won't actually be the ones building anything. Our job, much like Seb Coe with the Olympics, is to prove viability, provide a plan, and prepare the ground for a Government-led development. This is how Canary Wharf, now one of Britain's most successful developments, was built.
Our job is to promote East Anglia—a huge asset to Britain (Joe has centuries of family history in Norfolk) that has long been ignored. We think East Anglia, Suffolk, and Haverhill specifically are hugely strategically important to Britain's future, and have been under-invested in by successive governments.
Planning costs around £250m, funded entirely by private investors. They're motivated by two things: fixing Britain, and making a return on their money. If the project never gets approved, they lose their money, not you.
Construction splits into two parts. Homes largely pay for themselves—each one is sold as it's built. Infrastructure (the railway, reservoir, hospital, tram network, and energy) costs roughly £40–50bn, borrowed by the city itself from large-scale infrastructure lenders and repaid over decades from the city's own revenues: commercial land, ground rents, and the enormous land value the city creates. This is a standard setup for large-scale infrastructure projects.
We will, but only if the city becomes a thriving and successful economy where people want to live.
The cost of planning and executing the project is vast—over £250m in the next few years. We feel strongly that this shouldn't be done with taxpayer money.
We did initially try to structure the project as a non-profit (we're motivated primarily by fixing the social contract), but it quickly became clear that there wasn't enough money available to fund this type of project in the non-profit space.
We therefore looked to private investors to fund the initial phase. Investors need returns, and we therefore have created a for-profit entity. This entity will pay salaries, bills, and eventually make more money than its investors put in.
In order to keep both us and our investors aligned to the goal of solving the social contract—building homes, jobs, and infrastructure—our company's returns are tied to commercial land, not to houses. This means we'd lose money if we just built a load of homes and no infrastructure—no companies would want to move in!
Haverhill in the driver's seat. Come to a co-design session, or tell us what you think—your input shapes what this becomes.