A group of 18 volunteers carried out a landscape & biodiversity survey on Saturday 15 July to look at the wider landscape around the village. This was to clarify the identity of the rural landscape and setting that we wish to protect, including looking at the route that EWR might take. A biodiversity survey was also undertaken to map the trees, hedgerows and landuses we have that support our wildlife. This would provide a base map from which the village could consider ways to protect and enhance the landscape and environment.
Over the summer we are continued to collect further evidence on the landscape character within the village, tree preservation orders, Green Belt Assessment of Harston’s surrounding fields.
All the above work on collecting evidence about the character of the village and parish, as well as previous work done on ‘views within the village’, ‘into and out of the village’ and on ‘green spaces’ were reviewed at an interactive workshop on September 12 led by Alison Farmer, a landscape architect. This helped improve the NP team’s understanding of ‘sense of place’ and what was involved in producing a landscape appraisal document, and how it should be set out using all the evidence we had collected so far. This will help us formulate our policies, in the next landscape workshop on November 16, to identify sensitivities to development – EWR & future housing, supporting the general objectives in the Neighbourhood Plan.
From the beginning of October we started work again with Rachel Hogger, the NP Consultant to start the process of writing the draft Neighbourhood Plan policies and other content after reviewing once again the basic framework of themes and objectives. The aim is to show this to south Cambs in December for their initial comments.
Concurrently, the Parish Council & NP group continue to liaise with S Cambs who l be sending out a housing survey questionnaire mid- November to assess the existing need within the village. Then they will be looking for a small rural exception site to provide affordable housing for Harston village people. Harston PC put out a ‘call for sites’ to see if there are any via sites for development and on 13 October an AECOM team visited Harston to assess just 5 of the 16 sites originally looked after, most being brownfield sites. Many had been discounted at the desk top research stage as present South Cambs Local Polices & Greenbelt restrictions discounted many.
