Categories:  Transport Assessment, Travel Plan, Junction Design
Client:  Lioncourt Strategic Land
Project Date:  2011 - 12
Contact:  Roger Key
Location:  Honeybourne, Worcestershire

Honeybourne lies five miles east of Evesham in rural Worcestershire.  Yet this site presented a rare opportunity to build 70+ new homes and a small employment area within just four minutes’ walk of a railway station providing direct Intercity services to Worcester, Oxford and London Paddington. So it scored highly in terms of accessibility by sustainable transport. However, providing access to the site was far from simple for practical and environmental reasons. 

The site enjoyed a reasonably long, straight frontage to a road of suitable standard but the access location was heavily constrained by two conflicting factors – a high pressure gas main wayleave, into which encroachment was undesirable commercially, and a hedgerow that contained species suggesting it dated back to mediaeval times, and required maximum retention. Until the species count was undertaken the access junction was positioned away from the gas main but this would have involved significant loss of ancient hedgerow.  After the significance of the hedgerow was identified, the access was moved to fall within the gas wayleave and to pass through the hedge within the length that had been wholly removed and replanted when the gas main was installed.  This explanation over-simplifies the time and care that went into identifying this solution but in the end, an ecologically sensitive solution was found that involved minimal loss of the ancient hedgerow.  

To support the planning application a Transport Assessment was prepared, along with separate Travel Plans for the residential and employment development and a Stage 2 Road Safety Audit of the access junction.

The site was sold by Lioncourt Strategic Land to Bovis Homes and is now complete.