About

Ground Plan is committed to improving ordinary housing. For the last few years we have been investing in land outside London and are determined to show what other volume housebuilders could and should be doing.

Our research into existing communities in the UK informs the way in which our developments are designed, owned and managed. These places, which have proved successful over time, have inspired our proposals for developments in Kintbury, Aldershot and Lambourn.

For us designing new neighbourhoods is primarily about creating a sense of community and place. Our developments are organised around an infrastructure of shared spaces. These are the common ground of the neighbourhood. They encourage a sense of civility and neighbourly spirit, a theatre for public life.

In our developments the freehold of these communal areas would be owned by the residents. Buying one of our properties means buying into the community.

We take a progressive view on the environment, demanding that the architects we work with are experts in environmentally robust design. We want to be ahead of the game, responding now to government directives calling for zero carbon housing by 2016. And, perhaps most importantly, we want our properties to be a viable alternative to what is currently on offer. To achieve this goal they must be comparable in terms of cost.

Our interest is always to understand the aspirations of a neighbourhood when we plan a scheme and our new developments should give the wider community a new asset to share.

The localism agenda opens an opportunity for us to work with neighbourhoods to develop plans for their improvement and expansion – and we are be interested in developing new ways of doing this, by which the neighbourhood's new plan might result in a large slice of the profit resulting from turning fields into housing staying with the community.