Work has begun on the road network of a new town in north Sutherland intended to house 55,000 people relocating from the south east of England.
The town has been provisionally named Nu-Tunbridge, after the place most of the projected residents are expected to come from, in a decision the developers describe as “wayfinding” and everybody else describes as a warning.
The layout is a grid. The principal boulevards are eight lanes wide. The residential streets are six. There is a central axis 40 metres across, named Pantiles Way, terminating at a roundabout named after a high street in Kent.
Roads first
The unusual feature of the project is sequencing. The entire road network is being constructed in phase one. Housing is phase three.
Phase two is a retail park.
The developers argue this is standard practice at scale and reduces disruption to residents, which is technically correct in that there are no residents to disrupt. Contractors are currently laying eight-lane carriageway across open moorland toward a junction with a single-track road.
“There is a set of traffic lights out there, fully working, on a three-lane approach, in the middle of a bog. It changes every ninety seconds. There is nothing for eleven miles.”
A contractor on the site
Nu-Tunbridge, phase one
- Planned population: 55,000
- Current population: 0
- Boulevards: 8 lanes; residential streets 6
- Roundabouts completed: 14
- Houses completed: 0
- Waitrose: committed in principle, subject to the town existing
The objection nobody expected
Opposition has come from an unexpected direction. A number of prospective residents, having visited the site, have withdrawn.
The stated reason in most cases was not the weather, the distance or the absence of houses. It was the roads. Several said they had left the south east specifically to get away from eight-lane infrastructure, and were disappointed to find it waiting for them, freshly surfaced, on a moor.
The developer has confirmed the boulevards will proceed as designed, on the grounds that they are already half built.
