Development Projects

Jeff Bishop recently led the consultation team on an extremely exciting, sustainability-led, internationally significant project for the Science Museum Wroughton (on an old airfield near Swindon).

Part of Jeff Bishop's work in Rome was to manage (with Ray Lorenzo) the early stages of a collaborative process to regenerate the redundant central markets. Work is now complete, based on a complex partnership and a very mixed project.

BDOR and our Associates now work regularly with multi-disciplinary teams on many regeneration projects. Our role is as Engagement Managers and we work extremely closely with the lead partners. Recent and highly successful projects include for the the Lister's site in Dursley (with Arup), in Weston-super-Mare, Trowbridge, Salisbury and Bridgwater (with Gillespies), all supported by the South West of England Regional Development Agency.

Private sector work includes two housing sites (in Oxfordshire and Cornwall) for Persimmon, a housing site in Harlow for Crest Strategic Projects, a supermarket site (with other associated uses) in Bognor Regis for Sime Darby and the largest wind power project in South Wales (and two smaller ones) for Nuon Renewables.  The Bognor project generated the following feedback:

"BDOR displayed and demonstrated the highest quality practice in leading the consultation process to secure key stakeholder and public consensus about ... a site of great sensitivity in the town.  It should be held up as an example of best practice."

HENGROVE PARK

This project merits a fuller description. Several years ago, London consultants were brought in to develop plans to improve and add new buildings to a huge area of poor quality open space in South Bristol - Hengrove Park (another old airfield). They did no consultation, the project generated enormous protest and was dropped (with a major waste of money). BDOR came in to rebuild community and stakeholder confidence and then join the Arup-led team to start afresh.

After many months of careful and thorough community involvement, an exciting new scheme emerged (exciting enough to attract extra funding) and a planning application was submitted. Despite planner fears of another massive protest, the application received a "staggeringly small" number of objections!