Reading Passage 2 Sustainable Growth At Didcot The outline of a report by South | Course Hero

infrastructure and community services deficits, with no obvious means of correction.

We wish to ensure that there is greater recognition of the cost attached to housing

growth, and that a means is found to resource the establishment of sustainable

communities in growth areas.

Until the 1950s, the development of job opportunities in the railway industry, and

in a large, military ordnance depot, was the spur to Didcot’s expansion. Development

at that time was geared to providing homes for the railway and depot workers, with

limited investment in shopping and other services for the local population. Didcot

failed to develop Broadway as a compact town centre, and achieved only a strip of

shops along one side of the main street hemmed in by low density housing and

service trade uses.

From the 1970s, strategic planning policies directed significant new housing

development to Didcot. Planners recognised Didcot’s potential, with rapid growth in

local job opportunities and good rail connections for those choosing to work farther

afield. However, the town is bisected by the east-west railway, and people living in

Ladygrove, the urban extension to the north which has been built since the 1980s,

felt, and still feel, cut off from the town and its community.

Population growth in the new housing areas failed to spark adequate private-

sector investment in town centre uses, and the limited investment which did take

place – Didcot Market Place development in 1982, for instance – did not succeed in

delivering the number and range of town centre uses needed by the growing

population. In 1990, public-sector finance was used to buy the land required for the

Orchard Centre development, comprising a superstore, parking and a new street of

stores running parallel to Broadway. The development took 13 years to complete.

The idea that, by obliging developers of new housing to contribute to the cost of

infrastructure and service requirements, all the necessary finance could be raised,

has proved unachievable. Substantial public finance was still needed to deliver major

projects such as the new link road to the A34 on the outskirts of the town at Milton,

the improved railway crossing at Marsh Bridge and new schools. Such projects were

delayed due to difficulties in securing public finance. The same problem also held

back the expansion of health and social services in the town.