Campaign groups behind a revolutionary new town centre development, billed as the most sustainable town in the UK, have urged supermarkets and other food companies to “embrace” the concept.
The Food Foundation is partnering with radical developer Human Nature Places, a company set up by former Greenpeace directors, which has just won planning permission to build nearly 700 homes on a brownfield site in Lewes, East Sussex.
Central to the ‘The Phoenix’ site will be a health and food strategy, including a community canteen, a culture of food growing and a pledge to have affordable access to healthy food.
The development will range from million-pound-plus penthouse flats to 30% of the homes being affordable housing. The Food Foundation, which is to lead on the food and health strategy, said it provided a glimpse into the future of how town planning could be harnessed to tackle sustainability and the obesity crisis.
“This new model definitely provides questions for supermarkets and the food sector. There is a Tesco right opposite this site and a Waitrose at the other end of the road,” said Food Foundation head of campaigns and development Jo Ralling.
“These are big retailers and I would like to think they will embrace and get excited by what is happening and look at what they are going to do.
“I think certainly if those retailers and others like them are selling affordable and more locally sourced food, then they are going to attract the sort of people who will look to live in The Phoenix.
“This is not some sort of hippie commune.”
Designed to prioritise people over cars, the new site – which won planning permission from the South Downs National Park planning committee last week – will be a walkable, multi-use development on a former industrial site.
It is to be built around a principle of shared living, and when complete will be the UK’s largest timber-structure neighbourhood.
The Phoenix is described as a “blueprint for sustainable placemaking and positive social impact that can be deployed at scale”.
Lewes-based Human Nature was founded by former Greenpeace directors Michael Manolson and Jonathan Smales.
Smales said: “Our aim is to create a food culture and environment to tackle the reversible trends we are currently seeing at a national level. The current mainstream model of development is catastrophic.
”Not only does it fuel unsustainable lifestyles and the climate crisis, it also creates social divisions which exacerbate loneliness and fail to tackle obesity or diet-related diseases. Our focus on radically improving environmental and social impacts through the power of placemaking can create a template for the towns of tomorrow.”
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