As nimbys go, Mark Thistlethwayte seems quite enthusiastic about building over the countryside.
Standing in a field of winter barley, he shouts: “See that barn over there? That’s where the cricket pitch will be.” He turns and points again: “And see between those two pylons, that’s where we will build the first of three primary schools. The pylons will go, of course.”
Thistlethwayte, 56, is not a conventional property developer. He is a reformed nimby who has decided to build 6,000 homes in his Hampshire back yard, despite never having built a house.
The idea began when Fareham borough council proposed building 10,000 homes on Southwick estate, owned by the Thistlethwayte family, and neighbouring land. “My initial thought was ‘over my dead body’, but I saw who else owned the land and I knew [they would sell and] it was going to go ahead. So, I thought I’d better get involved if I’m going to live next door, and I guess I got a bit carried away.”
“A bit carried away” might be an understatement. Thistlethwayte now owns all the 1,000-acre site and has set up a company, Buckland Development, to run his garden village project with advisers, planners and architects including Ben Pentreath, one of the architects behind the Duchy of Cornwall’s Poundbury.
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Like Poundbury, the architecture at the new village, called Welborne, will be classical, although Thistlethwayte said it would have more green space than Prince Charles’s Dorset village.
Thistlethwayte, a former investment banker, was turned down by the council when he applied to build his own home some 20 years ago. “I actually think one of my advantages is that I haven’t built a house before. This is a fantastic opportunity to start with a blank piece of paper.”
And he has done his research: “I have been all over the country and elsewhere trying to take the best ideas from everywhere — Poundbury, Bournville, Letchworth Garden City ... Malmo.”
Ex-service personnel and homeless people will be offered the chance to build their own home and work as gardeners, carpenters, builders, plumbers and other maintenance staff.
Hiccups are perhaps to be expected on a project including up to 6,000 homes including self-build plots, three primary schools, one secondary school, 20 nurseries, 13 playgrounds, 11 hectares of sports facilities, 10,000 sq m of retail space, 105,000 sq m of business space and 84 hectares of park and woodland that will take 25 years to build.
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“One of the biggest frustrations has been how much time it takes,” Thistlethwayte said. “I said to myself, ‘We’ll start in five years.’ Other people said it would take seven to eight, but it will be 16 when we start building.” Construction of the first 750 homes is due to start next year.
Although Thistlethwayte said he had the support of locals, past objectors have included the Campaign to Protect Rural England Hampshire. He also has not made it easy for himself, challenging the status quo every step of the way. “The council didn’t want so many trees and they said it would cost £5,000 for the maintenance of each one. I thought, ‘OK, we’ll do it ourselves.’ We will set up our own management company.
“At moments, frustration with the system has stamped out the pleasure of the creative bits,” Thistlethwayte said.
Why does he think he can do better than the big developers? “The housebuilders’ role is to not to build communities but to build houses as quickly as possible and they are very efficient at what they do. The problem is that publicly quoted companies are judged on short-term results. We are thinking in generational terms. I don’t mind if I don’t make money this year or next, I’m looking at the next ten, 15, 50 years,” he said.
Thistlethwayte’s sense of legacy and community comes from inheriting the 8,000-acre Southwick estate, including the chocolate-box village of Southwick, which has been in his family since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. The family no longer owns Southwick House, the centrepiece of the estate, which was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence in the Second World War — it was the allied commanders’ headquarters for the D-Day landings — and is now the Defence School of Policing and Guarding.
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He hopes to instil in Welborne the sense of community he sees in Southwick by placing a strong emphasis on building the infrastructure first, including pubs and shops stocked with produce from the estate. A community trust to be run by the residents will also be set up. “This is a passion for me, but it can’t be a deadweight to fall on my [three] children. It can’t be Mark’s project, it has to belong to the community,” he said.
There are plans to future-proof the village with drones to deliver parcels from a central hub and virtual GP services beamed into every home. Each home will be heated by ground-source heat pumps and solar power. Thistlethwayte founded a renewable energy company, Welborne Energy, and built a 48-megawatt solar park to supply the village.
“There have been plenty of false starts and things I have not been sure about, for instance air source heat pumps make perfectly good sense until you have 6,000 of them and they are all blowing out cold air, so what does that do to a garden village? Frost in September?”
His approach has also been influenced by his career as a financier: he is proposing joint ventures with local builders and investing in local businesses, including a brickworks, to help them to scale up, a practice borrowed from his work at his private equity firm Buckland Capital Partners.
He has invested £130 million in the £2 billion venture, although “this is not a philanthropic project” and he intends to make a profit, eventually.
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With several large developers circling eager to buy him out, why wait? “We have the opportunity to do something ourselves and do something we are proud of. I like to think we could start a new way to build houses and communities, if we show we can do it well.”
And will he finally build his own home? “I don’t think so, but I would be very happy for my children to build their own,” he said.
