For nearly 40,000 residents of Abingdon-on-Thames, ensuring that this historic town continues to offer them a sustainable, healthy, happy, and community-focussed place to live has become the core aim of the development of our Neighbourhood Plan.
Work on the Neighbourhood Plan started last year with groups of socially distanced people undertaking a detailed examination of their immediate neighbourhoods, looking at where they live through five lenses: planning, landscape, architecture, culture, and engineering. Virtual focus groups allowed participants to share their own thoughts and ideas on a range of other topics including families, a greener Abingdon, heritage, business and the town centre economy, culture, sports, and leisure. Children from local primary schools were also involved over the Easter holidays when they were asked to complete worksheets contributing their viewpoints to the plan.
With its historic past, riverside walks, parkland space offered in the Abbey Meadows, cycle paths, easy access to the local countryside and Oxford’s cultural hub, Abingdon provides its residents with a good platform on which to build for the future. Throughout its long history, however, the town has never stood still, and it is important now – perhaps more than ever following the Covid pandemic – for a plan to be created that will set out a vision for the town over the next ten to fifteen years that builds on peoples’ hopes and everyday experiences.
Once the Neighbourhood Plan for Abingdon is adopted, following a local referendum, the Local Planning Authority will have to take all factors of the plan into account when considering planning applications and developments across Abingdon. Whilst the Neighbourhood Plan is an initiative of Abingdon’s Town Council, it is being developed by a steering group of volunteers supported by a specialist urban design consultancy who have considerable experience in successful neighbourhood planning.
One of the key suggestions which emerged from the community outreach was a request for a trail to better connect the town centre with the river with the redevelopment of a long empty hotel site as a destination to facilitate making this happen. This would not only enhance recreational facilities in but also offer cultural opportunities by creating a riverside hub, comprising housing, workshops, and performance spaces in a new riverside quarter.
Other suggestions emerging from the outreach sessions held over the summer were to provide more cycle-friendly routes into and around the town; ‘lido-ising’ the open-air swimming pool and repurposing the multi-story carpark which – as travel becomes less private car focussed – will not get the use it has in the past. Running in parallel to these suggestions, various task groups considered issues such as green spaces, neighbourhood identity, the future of the town centre as a place to shop and culture of the town.
All this work is now available for comment on the Town’s website at abingdon-neighbourhood-plan.org
Simon Hills, Chair of the neighbourhood planning Steering Group said: “The more of us that join in, the better the Neighbourhood Plan will be and the closer we’ll get to my own aspiration for Abingdon, building a town which is sustainable, vibrant, healthy and a thriving community, attracting high-quality development and making it an even better place to live, work and visit for generations yet to come.”
