Legacy in Practice Ep 3 Hartree with Frances Wright

This is Legacy in Practice, a podcast series from E.C.F. - Engage, Communicate, Facilitate.

In this episode, Oliver Deed travels to North Cambridge — to a quiet residential street called Marmalade Lane — where forty-two homes were designed alongside the people who now live in them.

It's a small project. But it carries a big idea.

Because just up the road sits the proposed Hartree masterplan — five thousand six hundred homes, alongside workplaces, schools and community facilities. And when the team behind that scheme began thinking about how to engage communities at scale, they looked here first.

Oliver is joined by Frances Wright, Head of Community Partnering at TOWN, and Tom Lord from the Sortition Foundation — whose work in deliberative recruitment helped shape the Ideas Exchange, a process designed to bring together residents who genuinely reflected the wider community, not just the most vocal voices.

The conversation moves from co-design and gentle density to the realities of sustaining participation across a long and uncertain planning timeline. What happens when engagement works — but the project stalls anyway? And what does meaningful participation actually leave behind?

This episode is about the difference between consultation as a stage in planning, and engagement as part of the design of a place itself.

A study in patience, process, and what communities can teach us — if we give them the time.

Legacy in Practice is a podcast series from E.C.F., documenting the projects, decisions, and relationships shaping places across the UK.

To learn more, visit engagecf.co.uk or follow E.C.F. on LinkedIn.

This episode is part of the E.C.F. podcast series, exploring how community engagement shapes real places.

To learn more about our work, visit engagecf.co.uk or follow E.C.F. on LinkedIn for updates, insights, and future episodes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:03

This is Legacy in Practice, a podcast series from ETF, Engage Communicate Facilitate. For over eight years, ETF has worked alongside councils, public bodies and developers across the UK, helping major projects move forward by building trust, navigating complexity, and engaging communities meaningfully, especially when the conversations are difficult. I'm Oliver Deeds, I'm the founder and CEO of ETF, and in this series I'm walking back through the projects that have shaped our work alongside the people who were there at the time. Each episode is recorded on foot, the places where decisions were tested, relationships were built, and public scrutiny was very real. The aim is simple to provide the sector with a clear record of what works, what doesn't, and what must change if the UK is serious about improving participation, accountability, and trust in the process. This is ETF's legacy told candidly by the people who are there. In this episode, we're in North Cambridge, standing on a street called Marmalade Lane. At first glance, it's a quiet residential street. 42 homes, shared gardens, children's bikes leaning against fences. And if you're lucky, the occasional hedgehog wandering between the gardens through small gaps deliberately built into the boundary fences. Tell me about the hedgehogs. What's going on? Have you got a hedgehog?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

She's a three-legged hedgehog, but she's living in my apartment for the didn't really seem to care. Haven't you got a dog? I've got a dog, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

So how does the dog interact with uh with the hedgehog?

SPEAKER_01 1:47

She is quite used to a hedgehog because obviously I go to feed her. I used to go to feed her every day.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Is it cat food that you feed to hedgehogs, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, so she would obviously like a bit of cat food.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That voice you just heard belongs to Frances Wright, head of community partnering at town. Frances works at the intersection of development, design and participation, helping communities play a meaningful role in shaping the places where they live. And Marmalade Lane is a good place to begin that conversation. Because this small co-housing development was designed alongside the people who live here now. Residents help shape the layout, the shared spaces, and even small details like those hedgehog routes between gardens. But Marmalade Lane isn't the main story of this episode. Just a short distance from here sits the site of the proposed Hartree development. The plan for Hartree was much larger. Around 5,600 homes, alongside workplaces, schools, and community facilities. Designed to reconnect a part of North Cambridge that has long been separated from the city itself. And when the team behind the project began thinking about how to engage the community, they looked here to Marmalade Lane, not just as a housing project, but as a working example of what meaningful participation can look like.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Great to see you, Ollie.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Great to see you too. This is probably my favourite road in the whole of the UK, and it appears on all of Act to Travel England's uh brochures. So tell us a bit more about Marmalade Lane.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

So Marmalade Lane is a co-housing community in North Cambridge, 42 homes, co-designed with future residents. The city council was the landowner, decided to do something different, and went through the process of first of all developing a co-housing group and then recruiting an enabling developer who were town, who I now work for.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

It's got significance to the Heartree project because we actually ended up doing quite a lot of engagement events at this space.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Marmalade Lane has so many features that are were relevant to the discussion and supported people to perhaps think about development differently. Being able to take some local residents to visit here supported that conversation about how could you how could you imagine a different place? What is different? And coming, because it's a co-housing community, we have the luxury of an additional house called the Common House, so we had a large meeting place where we could come to.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

So one of the things that was really impactful as part of the Hartree engagement process, I think, was the Ideas Exchange, which met here at Marmalade Lane on a few occasions. Tell us a little bit more about the genesis of the Ideas Exchange and what it was all about and how it fitted in with the engagement process.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

We really wanted to find a way to do engagement differently, and some of it was around the context. We're going to see that Hartree is a site that is quite disconnected to North Cambridge generally. There's no reason why anyone would have visited the site. And so there was a challenge of how to get local people engaged and thinking about it. But also, master planning is a really long process, and we wanted a way to have sort of quite deep conversations with people over that period of the evolution of the design. And so we wanted some form of deliberative panel drawn from the local community, and I suppose we're inspired by citizens' assemblies and how they recruit deliberative panels, and so we experimented with that.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

Honestly, this is the place to be, Marmalade Lane really is, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

And so we used that approach to select a panel that was deliberately designed to be uh representative of the local community. So use the demographics from the census uh to to generate that panel, and then that panel accompanied us for probably over two years, um longer than we initially intended. And over that time, they they sort of absorbed by osmosis really an understanding of development and the built environment, and we took them on walks around Cambridge with an architect, and we obviously visited the site.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

I remember that day.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

There's some pictures of us in hard hats and uh the the high V's and we came to Marmalade Lane and we always combined. I suppose we were quite careful to make it an event that added value to them, and so we created it as a bit of a social activity. So we mixed in-person meetings where we always ate and had a drink together with with online sessions, which obviously more efficient, easier for the design team, but don't have that doesn't have that sort of same social quality. Um and that panel has gone on to have a life of its own, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 6:57

Yeah, I have to say we've used it on a couple of other projects as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

So yes, and they really have. I think the feedback I've had is they really have absorbed some understanding, so you're not starting with people who are sort of fresh to some of the concepts. They've absorbed that over the period of the two years. So they're very um interested in development in North Cambridge and uh have been delighted, I think, to continue on some other projects.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

And it's one of the things over the last eight years, we we tried to do quite a lot of deliberative uh work and we've had varying degrees of success. And I think actually Hartree is the project that really stacks up and stands out amongst all of them. And how how do you think we can take this model out to the particular development industry in the next few years? Because I don't know about you, but I think this is the way that engagement should be done on big master plans.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Engagement on big master plans is really difficult, isn't it? Because they're they're so complex and they take such a it takes such a lot of time and it's and it's they're so iterative that that engaging with people over them is really quite challenging. And I think there's two aspects, I suppose, to the ideas exchange that stood out for me. One was that the long the longitudinal aspect of the conversations that just um with the same people that you don't get the opportunity to do otherwise, but also the fact that we were able to make sure that we were talking to a demographically representative group that felt really important. It was challenging, it was challenging to uh um particularly to get younger people involved, and because of the time period we were engaging with them, some people uh kind of went on, left Cambridge, pursued their careers, um, so we sort of lost a bit of that over time. How do you do more of it?

SPEAKER_02 8:45

Well, you are doing some more of it.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

We are doing more, I was gonna say that, yes, we're doing it on a much smaller site with the Crown Estate down in Hemel Hempstead and exploring how that works on a sort of smaller scale for a shorter period of time. The same researcher from Cambridge University who looked into the Ideas Exchange is also looking into how that worked there. And we're playing around with some of those demographics, the criteria that we use to select the demographic group, and there we experimented with looking using household tenure and the number of cars, because actually car ownership so influences how people think about the kind of conversations we're often having with development about how do you support active travel, what if the cars radically aren't parked outside the front door, what if you know, how can you support a more sort of dense, good density? It's it's important to have that diversity actually in terms of car ownership as well, and that's that proved really quite key on on this other side as well that we did that.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

So I think one of the things that is really beneficial in terms of doing the ideas exchange approach or the demographically representative approach is that you can get people from different backgrounds into a room and not just thinking about their own perspectives but also thinking about projects from the perspective of the other people in the room. So it actually gets people really critically thinking about a project and gets them out of their own minds.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

It's the one-to-one conversation you might have at a public exhibition, you've got that diversity in the room. I think the other thing for me was actually it turned out to be really quite easy to set up. Yeah. Um, and that's really where using sortition really came into its own because they had such an established methodology, and they could predict with accuracy if we sent this many invitations out, you we would get this level of response, and that was great. But it their understanding of their approach meant it was really very simple, very formulaic from a sort of client perspective. It was a very straightforward process. Um, and of course, uh in accordance with good practice, everyone was uh remunerated, so they all received payments for their engagement with us as well through that journey.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Let's go and talk to Tom.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yep, let's go and find him.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

At this point in the walk, another voice joins the conversation. Tom Law from the Sortition Foundation lives here at Marmalade Lane.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Hi Tom, are you ready?

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Oh, what are we doing? Am I coming out?

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Shall we meet you in the South Room?

SPEAKER_02 11:21

The Sortition Foundation specialises in selecting representative groups of people to take part. They specialise in selecting representative groups of people to take part in deliberative processes. The kind often used in citizens' assemblies and public decision making. Tom was involved in helping design the recruitment process for the ideas exchange. The goal was to create a group that could genuinely reflect the wider community. So the selection process had to be done carefully. Rather than relying on the usual volunteers or the most vocal participants, the panel was assembled using demographic data, ensuring a mix of ages, backgrounds, and perspectives. The aim was simple. To bring together a group of residents who, taken together, looked a little more like the community itself, and who could stay involved in the conversation as the master plan evolved. Tell us a bit more about those engagement projects.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

So we do a thing called democratic lotteries. We help to engage with the public uh in a certain way that we believe is the most legitimate way possible to answer complicated questions that affect a large number of people. So we work on all sorts of things like the development project with you, with uh national conversations, with parliaments, governments, with local councils, down to this local regional area, even within an organization to get a representative, diverse bunch of views from the people affected by decisions made.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

And you ran the process of recruiting that panel for Hartree.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

For Hartree, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Yeah. But a bit personal to you because you live in the area, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:57

I I so this came about in an unusual way. Yeah, it turned out that my neighbour, Francis Tudars Down, was responsible for community engagement on a on a development project, and so we got talking and it became clear that we had this in common. And um, so yeah, it's personal to me. It's uh something that would have affected my community, my my neighbourhood, my apply for the panel out of interest. In fact, when we so we do um the way we do this thing, we do a two-step lottery to both to invite people to the process and then to select the people who are going to take part in the process. And there's all sorts of good reasons for that. But in the first round where we selected addresses for invitations to go to, my household actually got selected, and we we had to remove that from the list because we didn't think that was uh that wouldn't that maybe wouldn't look good from the outside. But you did get involved in other but by other means though. So I I attended, I was able to attend one or two of the sessions uh as an observer and just see what was going on in the room and and have a chat to the participants.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

And once once that group was established and you did your observations, what were your observations of how it ran?

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Well, I mean, being it's it's rare to be able to be on the inside. We're often the kind of doula for these processes, and then they go off into the world. So it was really great to be able to, because it was local, to be able to connect with the the process as it was running. You know, I was having a chat to uh a bunch of folks involved there. It looked like a really, really interesting process. We were designing the minutiae of street layouts and and zones of things that would affect different neighbourhoods and and so on, and the people there seemed really engaged. They were a great bunch to chat to. So yeah, it was um it was good to be able to see inside the process as well.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

And I suppose we we would really love to see more developers utilize the sortition process and deliberation as a method, and I'm sure you do too. Uh, what would your message be to developers to encourage them to use sortition moving forward?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah, right. So I think if you want to use the most legitimate form of decision making that we know about in the sector at the moment, in the kind of deliberative sector, um, if you want to make sure there is space held for uh marginalized voices, for diversity, if you want to make sure that the the people having a say on your development are broadly representative of the wider community as a whole, then I think you have to look at sortition, at deliberative approaches like this, uh, in order to really do justice to representing the group of people that are going to be affected by the decisions you're making on your projects. And we've seen this work on a variety of projects. We worked on development projects on local council, community centres, on neighbourhood developments like this one, you know, in the built environment. There's quite a few projects that are that are using this approach and finding it really rich and that it really feels representative of the wider community. Obviously, I think people are aware of other forms of engagement that go on around development processes, and often I hear people saying, Well, I don't feel like this is really gonna represent my views, I'm not really gonna be heard, this is tokenistic, and so on. And I think this kind of engagement that that Hartree embodied, this kind of longer-term, really well thought out, how are we gonna get this diverse representative bunch of people in the room is really a positive way to change that for the better.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

And hopefully we can do a lot more work together in the next eight years. I would love that. Yes, please. Let's do it. Thank you very much. Great. So let's go back outside. By this point in the walk, we're about halfway through the story. Tom's explanation of how the ideas exchange was assembled gives a sense of the structure behind the engagement process. A way of bringing together a group of residents who could stay with the project as it evolved. But participation wasn't only about process, it also began to shape the conversation about the place itself. So we turn back to Francis, who explains how the identity of the development, even its name, began to emerge through that dialogue alongside an important design principle behind the master plan, gentle density. So the name Hartree, Francis, where did that come from?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Well, that came from a deliberative process in and of itself. Once we got over the hurdle of the sort of fear that it would be involving people and actually taking a potential name to the public, the fear of um replicating Boatie Magbote. Once we managed to worked out a process where there was no conceivable risk, then we were we essentially had a process that involved um both a sort of combination of experts looking, researching and contributing names and workshops with people from the local area generating names as well, and then those names were whittled down into a long list, and that long list went to the Ideas Exchange who deliberated over them and came up with a short list, a recommended short list, which the landowners approved, and that short list then went out for a public vote. And Hartree was the name that was chosen, which I was uh really pleased about.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

And who was Hartree?

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Well, Hartree uh it was named after Eva Hartree, who was the first female mayor of the city of Cambridge, and so uh we have a lot of uh new parts of Cambridge that have been named after male scientists. Hartree also was a male scientist, but it was named after Eva Hartree, so they might sort of the town side of Cambridge and a woman.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

So the great way a great way to name a development, I would say. Really good.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

It was really good, and I think part of it was part of I think it played an important part in raising the visibility that that there was this site, which was a combination of sort of council land, bus depot, industrial, and then a a waste uh waste water treatment plant uh owned by Anglian Water. So that that that didn't parts of northeast Cambridge that really not well connected to the local area at all.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Let's let's touch on the proposals themselves. Just give us a summary of uh the scheme as it as it was.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

So uh the scheme was for a multi-use development with 5,600 homes, really trying to work with the concept of gentle density and good density and getting uh to support the kind of environment where people would be able to walk and cycle and meet most of their daily needs really easily within the neighbourhood. So it was based around a number of neighbourhoods, and uh a really lovely feature was that running through the site was what was called the Play Street, with a combination of different sized outdoor rooms and play spaces, programmed differently, but it enabled you to walk through the site and connect to those spaces. But around the site was a green loop as well, and very much preserving some of the sort of trees and landscape that was already there, and a magnificent uh water park, I suppose, a water feature using some of the currently unused water tanks on the site, and find and the proposals found a way to preserve those and enhance them. So really positive. I think it's probably worth also just saying on Hartree, one of the things about it was it it would have reconnected North Cambridge and particularly North East, that bit of North East Cambridge, very disconnected, and it would definitely have sort of stitched it all together really nicely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:08

Francis, why don't we tell the story of how we ended up working together?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

You'd just come back from Australia, hadn't you?

SPEAKER_02 21:14

I had, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

And uh an ECF in London was new. It was relatively new relatively new, yes. Um I remember an online interview because we were probably doing it.

SPEAKER_02 21:28

I'm not sure I told you this, but I I I I'd been slightly briefed beforehand that you were the key person to get on board.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Really?

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Yeah, so I I did my best in a online call to charm you, and uh I'm not sure if it works or not. Evidently it was. Well maybe it did, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

It was great fun working together.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

I I think at the time it was a it was a big project for us because it was the f so we we'd done some work in in Mfield and on a couple of other projects, but this one, because of the scale of it and the location of it, and I'd lived in Cambridge previously, so But I ha I did have a connection to the city. It was a really big appointment for us, and what I hadn't quite clocked at the time was how much of a like kindred spirit you were in terms of doing engagement in the right way, and that there was such an alignment in terms of making sure that we go out to as wide a group as as possible on this side.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

I mean, obviously, this was my first engagement project as well. Well, that I mean that does slightly baffle me because you're not. And so I suppose I probably were just thinking about or what kind of engagement would I like to happen if I were. And of course, I also live in the area. So I suppose I took that perspective with me. And I come from a background where we have a very sort of highly collaborative approach in terms of some of my sort of working background. So it I would come from it from that perspective.

SPEAKER_02 22:52

And that did actually shine through quite a lot. Working together for what was it, three and a half, four years, in terms of it always felt to me like we were just one team rather than you as a client and us as a consultancy. It was like whenever we were in meetings, we would always just be free-balling ideas. And I I I I'll admit it now, I think probably 85-90% of the good ideas originated from you that we just helped to deliver, really. So, which which was fine from our perspective.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

I think we certainly, myself and my colleagues in town, we had some very clear views about how we wanted to do engagement on this project, and so we probably didn't give you a lot of scope. We often had very clear ideas, and I think we started, didn't we, with wanting um wanting to hold a festival, and so we had a two-day festival right in the sort of right at the beginning of the engagement process where we were sharing and getting feedback on the vision for the site, and that was quite quite an event. And good event though. It was a really good event.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

We got a high turnout in that part of the city.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

And we had to think really carefully about how do you get people to come to North East Cambridge, and we were particularly focused on getting people from North East Cambridge to that event. So we had uh alongside the exhibition and presentations and discussions and workshops. We also had the kind of things you'd associate with a festival, really, some food stands and a bar and music, Cambridge Community Circus, the Climate Magician. We had the local bike company bringing along cargo bikes for people to cycle around on and have a almost crash a couple of those, I have to say. So we tried to think about I suppose the demographics of North East Cambridge as well. So we we had vouchers for the food van, and we also had a sort of freestand with cakes and drinks, so nobody needed to think uh about you know, the cost was really low for people as well. Um and we had uh Dr. Bike who came to repair people's bikes, which is a very Cambridge-specific intervention, I have to say. But very relevant also to some of the proposals for the site, so you know as was the Climate Magician, really. So really trying to pick up the themes that were in the purpose, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 25:24

It wasn't just right, we'll get some fun activities. It did have a the the residing memory I have of that is there was a lady who was in a mobility scooter, she had this bright blue hairdo, and she had three or four kids with her, and I had a chat with her, and I said, Have you ever been to anything like this before? And she said, Absolutely never, I would never come to anything like this. But she'd been coaxed in by the the food vouchers, and in the end, she went and had a look at the scheme, and she it was really successful in that. And she would never have engaged with the project unless we'd done that.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Absolutely not, and that would so that was really key, I think.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

I think it's worth talking about two organisations that we actually partnered up with on lots of the work that was done, and I'm thinking of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination and Voiceability, Cambridgeshire. Do you want to talk a little bit about what we did with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination?

SPEAKER_01 26:15

Yes, so they are an organ a local charity that works with local artists, um, often in schools, and they had worked with Cambridge University in relation to Eddington and came to work um with us on Hartree. And so they ran, and that was really important actually because it was very hard to get into the local schools, and uh Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination opened the doors for us to do that, and so they engaged a couple of local artists really to work with the first of all the primary school, and those ideas generated from the primary school that were then taken into the secondary school and evolved further, and then there was a little public exhibition of their work, which was all done through the medium of art, and um their Cambridge Curiosity Imagination made a film called I think it was called Um What Makes a Place, which is uh really interesting reflections from the children, really, about yeah, kind of what more than what do what do we need in a place, but just sort of the quality of a place. And um and then we we had a showing of that film and had an opportunity to talk to the students afterwards. So it was a really lovely uh sort of way of closing that engagement, and then they came along with us to the festival and did some activities there.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

And we also had Make Space for Girls at the festival.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

Yes, we had Make Space for Girls who were great, uh such an important perspective coming into the development. Then we did voiceability, didn't we?

SPEAKER_02 28:01

Who Several times, I think.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Several times. Again, so we got continuity in terms of who we were working with. So they supported adults with learning and other disabilities, and we engaged, I think, three times with them. I remember one of the just a really basic challenge around that was to find a venue that was really accessible, um, especially for people who were coming by public transport and yet was in North Cambridge.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

I think we ended up at the Novotel Hotel.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

We did, right near the station and the bus stops. Um, and I think they were really important to the conversation as well. I remember learning particularly about the schemes that local businesses can run in terms of advertising that's a safe place for them to go.

SPEAKER_02 28:45

I remember talking about changing places, toilets in particular.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah, so really quite um quite an important piece of engagement for us.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

And it fed directly into the master plan that was developed, which was important.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Yeah, and I think working with the design team as well, that they I think they really got into the engagement and really enjoyed the process as well and found it useful. And I suppose because it was such an iterative process, we were able to test ideas a bit more. It meant it was probably a bit hard harder, I suppose, because it's such a complex site and we were the engagement was ongoing. It's harder to say, well, we we said this, and then you said that, and then we did this. It's harder to present it in that world because it was much more of an organic long-term conversation with different stakeholders.

SPEAKER_02 29:36

I think at the end of the process, we found it quite hard to do a you said we did exercise because it was much more complicated than that, but it felt from the very start when we did that exercise on what would you like within your five-minute neighbourhoods right the way through to all of these very deliberate sessions. We had a project team that was really listening to the outcomes, and that that sort of seeped through into the master plan that was actually developed. One of the really interesting perspectives that we had into this project that perhaps other projects don't have is the perspective of people that don't actually live on the site yet, but might do in the future. So there was a piece of work done, this Live Work project, which really captured that input. Let's talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Yeah, so um, it wasn't a direct uh community engagement piece, was it? So we were uh less involved in it, but it did, it was a piece of research commissioned from Live Work who really do sort of service design. They surveyed and talked to people about how they would ideally live in the future, and and very much in the context that Hartree was going to bring I was going to ask people to live in a slightly different way, um, less car-centric and more apartment living, but apartments for families, and and that sort of challenges a bit of the sort of conventional wisdom about what is possible and what people want in terms of how they might might ideally live. So this this research was really focused on well, actually, how would people want to live if they were thinking about it differently and would and testing some of the vision for Hartree. And that directly fed into the And that then fed in, yeah, so that that reported back to the ideas exchange as well. So all of these sort of different threads did come together through the engagement process as well.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

Let's address the elephant in the room, which is the the Hartree scheme, sort of a planning application ready to go, but sadly it's still on the shelf. Uh it doesn't look like it's coming off the shelf for a little while. Where are we at with Heartry?

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Hartree isn't progressing, and as it really was a result of the relocation of the wastewater treatment plant that is net was necessary for that development to take place, not being able to secure additional funding from the government. And um and I think it left everyone involved from Landsec, UNI as was, but Lansec, town, the professional team really quite devastated, and and members of the Ideas Exchange as well, you know, we all put in so much into the project, really believed in it. It was such a such a loss and definitely had a sort of grieving process associated with it.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

I I would say a few months on the way I view it is that it is very disappointing that that's happened. Hopefully at some point something will be revived. Seems obvious that it will be in the future in Cambridge. It just has something has to happen there. But when when you reflect back on the scheme and all the work that went into it, and particularly engagement work, I feel like as a communications engagement professional, I learned so much from the process to apply to other projects that that whilst it doesn't replace the fact that the scheme isn't going anywhere, there is something that has of value has come out of it.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

So it was just a lovely opportunity, wasn't it, to play around with doing something different. It was a license to do that and experiment. Um, and yeah, I learned loads as well. So uh it's always good fun.

SPEAKER_02 33:24

So we view it positively ultimately.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Yes, ultimately.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

Thank you very much. Like many large developments, the future of Heartree now depends on factors beyond the engagement process. For the people who've spent years working on the Ideas Exchange, that pause has been frustrating. But the engagement process itself left a lasting impression because it demonstrated what can happen when communities are given the time and space to participate meaningfully. Over the course of this walk, you've heard how a project rooted in ambition also became an experiment in deeper participation. You've heard how places like Marmalade Lane can help communities imagine different possibilities for development, and how engagement, when done carefully, sustained over time, can move beyond consultation into something more collaborative. What this episode makes clear is that meaningful participation rarely happens quickly. It takes time, it takes trust, and it requires people on all sides willing to stay engaged, even when the outcome remains uncertain. For Francis and the team behind this work, the lesson is straightforward. Engagement works best when it's treated not as a stage in planning, but as part of the design of the place itself. If you found this conversation useful, please rate the podcast, follow the series, and share this episode with colleagues working in planning, development, and engagement. There are more walks, more projects, and more lessons to come. This is Legacy in Practice.