I have been working through last autumn helping Teignbridge District Council shape the designs of their masterplans for their Local Plan growth areas in three main areas around Newton Abbot in Devon. With Design Action, the Architecture Centre for Devon and Cornwall‘s enabling arm, I initially helped facilitate a collaborative design exercise with local people and community groups on the sites. The resulting plans have been taken by the council and developed into their policy plans.
As part of the discussion, I had suggested to the council the necessity for the new road access junctions to these developments to be designed in a way that maintained the characteristics of roads in the local area rather than resorting to national standard-designed roundabouts. We wanted to avoid these becoming soul-less pieces of infrastructure with little relationship to either the human scale familiar to people, nor to the rural market town landscape that epitomises Newton Abbot. The council subsequently asked us to initiate some initial junction design concepts that might achieve this and would be capable of being used to support government infrastructure planning funding.
I worked with Phil Jones Associates highway and transport planners and developed concepts that show how designs might take account of topographic distinctive of the sites and use built development to shape the nature of the resulting new places.
One of the junction design concepts
