I’ve been invited back to speak at the Rail Stations + Property Conference 2026 on 23 June in central London. I’ll be covering our recent research into the potential for the UK’s stations to deliver new homes in sustainable locations, and the potential impact of connecting London’s terminus stations on rail frequency and GDV.
Around England’s rural railway stations there is the capacity to build between 1m and 2m homes depending on where one sets an appropriate development density.
My own research has established this figure at around 1.2m homes, assuming development is constrained to just 10 minutes’ walk (approximately 800m) from a station, assuming a gross residential density of between 40 and 75 dwellings per hectare.
The eastern branch of the Thameslink railway franchise links London St Pancras (and beyond it, Brighton) to Cambridge, passing through Essex and the south Cambridgeshire countryside. The total journey time from Brighton to Cambridge takes just under two-and-a-half hours, with St Pancras the halfway point. Three quarters of an hour later the train arrives at the first of four rural stops: Ashwell & Morden, Meldreth, Shepreth and Foxton. In the middle of these sits the town of Royston (see map, below).
Foxton is just 12 minutes from Cambridge station; Ashwell & Morden 47 minutes from St Pancras and an hour from Kings Cross. These stations are extremely well connected, but serve a very low number of homes within the surrounding area.
In the year ending March 2023, Ashwell & Morden station had 140,000 passenger movements (entrances and exits) with just under a third of these in the direction of Cambridge.
Connections to the road network are also strong, with Meldreth, Shepreth and Foxton all located on, or close to, the A10, which links London to Cambridge. Ashwell & Morden is immediately adjacent to the A505, linking the M1, A1(M) and the M11.
Currently, Thameslink trains call at Ashwell & Morden and Royston, but Meldreth, Shepreth and Foxton are served by the Great Northern franchise, linking Cambridge to Kings Cross. The track is the same, and there is no reason why these two could not be consolidated into a single service. The proposed route for East West Rail also joins this line north of Foxton, with the potential to link these towns with Bedford and Oxford. It is also close to the new Biomedical Campus at Cambridge South, and the line passes through the new station being built there.
According to my research there is the potential for approximately 10,000 homes in the undeveloped land around Ashwell & Morden station alone. It is unencumbered by green belt designation nor is it covered by ecological land protections. The developable area around the station totals approximately 170ha within an 800m radius, and with an average density of just 60dph this would deliver more than 10,000 homes.
There is further potential for urban extensions to other villages along the line. Shepreth could accommodate 7,200 homes through a northern expansion of the settlement (the station itself separates the town from the countryside). 2,800 homes could be built through infill and enlargement of Meldreth.
Foxton straddles the boundary of Cambridge’s southern green belt yet has the capacity for 6,800 homes around a station that is largely surrounded by open fields. Together, the areas around these stations could accommodate at least 27,000 homes—considerably more, if the radius was expanded slightly further into the countryside.
The proposition becomes more attractive when one starts to think of these stations not as individual settlements but as a single entity. The potential journey time from Ashwell & Morden to Foxton is no longer than 16 minutes, meaning that a series of smaller towns, each with a population of some 40 to 50 thousand, could support significant new social infrastructure: several new primary schools in each location, with a new secondary school at Ashwell & Morden, and perhaps a second a Shepreth.
A new Development Corporation, structured along the railway line rather than around a single settlement, could coordinate physical and social infrastructure in the appropriate locations, and produce a masterplan and design codes to lock in placemaking and quality objectives. The Corporation would adopt planning powers to ensure that delivery and quality objectives are met. With the exception of a small part around Ashwell & Morden, all of these proposed settlement expansions fall within South Cambridgeshire District, simplifying planning powers.
The land either side of the track is mostly owned by Network Rail. With some creative thinking this could be exploited to provide cycleways linking the expanded settlements, supporting a transport modal shift away from car dependency.
Based on the assumptions set out above, the approximate capacity of each new or expanded settlement would be as follows:
| Station | Developable Area | Density at 60dph |
|---|---|---|
| Ashwell & Morden | 170ha | 10,200 homes |
| Meldreth | 47ha | 2,800 homes |
| Shepreth | 120ha | 7,200 homes |
| Foxton | 113ha | 6,800 homes |
| Total | 450ha | 27,000 homes |
There are many other examples of such stations along the railway lines that extend out from our cities where this approach to Development Corporations could be adopted too.
On 11 March 2025, the government published its long-awaited Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Included within the bill is an important amendment to the scope of Development Corporations, under paragraph 79, which states:
“A single development corporation may be established for the purposes of the development of more than one new town in England if the Secretary of State considers that having a single development corporation would facilitate efficient development.”
Paragraph 79(3), Planning and Infrastructure Bill, March 2025
Previously, the area of individual Development Corporations could only be contiguous. This amendment enables exactly the configuration that I am advocating for above, clearing the way for a single administrative body to cover several new settlements even where these do not share a common boundary.
I contributed to an article in the Economist newspaper about the state of Britain’s green belt, and the potential to build hundreds of thousands of homes around rural stations.
Since its introduction in the post-war period, where it started life as a pragmatic constraint on urban sprawl, the green belt has mutated into an ideological battleground.
Those who consider it to be an unnecessary constraint on progress advocate for its complete removal; others consider it to be sacrosanct, inviolable from development and to be protected at all costs.
The reality is—of course—more complex than this, yet it cannot be argued that a blanket ban on any form of development within the green belt, or any amendments to its boundaries, is either pragmatic or reasonable.
It is increasingly apparent that green belt policy needs to be revisited to ensure that it is delivering the best outcomes for citizens. There is not enough land to deliver the homes that we need.
Local planning authorities, who are responsible for managing green belt boundaries, are unlikely to be able to undertake such a task, needing a unified strategy spanning multiple authorities.
Given the strength of feeling and the geography of England’s green belt, this should take the form of a Royal Commission. Only an inquiry with this authority will be able to bring together the relevant parties to properly consider the full range of issues.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to find affordable housing within our cities, those who need to travel frequently to work are forced to live beyond the green belt – in particular, those on lower-paid jobs and the key workers on which cities rely. This adds significant time to the daily commute and acts as a huge drain on productivity and hampers growth.
A core objective of green belt policy is to prevent the merging of adjacent settlements. This is sensible. On the other hand, the almost blanket ban on any significant development within designated green belt represents a misunderstanding of its original purpose.
Many cities are surrounded by smaller towns which sit within the green belt: St Albans, Coventry, Guildford, Potters Bar, Macclesfield: these are all towns which are located entirely within the green belts of England’s cities. Green belt inhibits the merging of adjacent settlements, but also prevents the introduction of new settlements within it, even if they possess clear boundaries and sufficient green space to ensure they remain distinct from one another.
England’s train routes tend to radiate from the centre of its cities. Along many of these are stations which benefit from short travel times to urban centres, but which are located entirely within the green belt or open land.
These rural stations provide an obvious opportunity for high-density development close to public transport and within easy reach of places of work.
Multiple studies have shown that these rural stations have the capacity to sustain well over a million new homes. Yet restrictive planning policies, not least green belt protections, prevent this from happening.
10 minutes’ walk equates to around 800m (half a mile). A circle around a single station with a diameter of a mile could, even at modest densities, support up to 15,000 homes. That’s around half of the total number of homes that will be delivered on the Olympic Park.
Unlike Victorian and pre-war England, where new train lines and stations were built so that the land around them could be developed for housing, we would not need to construct new railways for this purpose. They already exist. But the mechanisms for bringing forward such development are subject to considerable planning constraints which often delay projects for years.
To speed up the delivery of homes in these locations we might adopt a Development Corporation model, with planning powers devolved to a specially incorporated body responsible for delivery. These development corporations would be responsible for bringing forward development in these locations within a defined period – perhaps 10 years – acting as a “master developer”, acquiring land and setting out a masterplan for each location, accompanied by a strict design code informed by the location and local character.
Design codes should set out building heights, street patterns, the quantum of accommodation, orientation and massing, but not favour any particular style: they should promote specificity and a sense of place, rooted in an understanding of context, but this does not mean that they should attempt to ape local vernacular styles.
To coordinate development along transport networks, development corporations could be established following railway lines. This would allow the introduction of social infrastructure, such as schools and healthcare facilities, which need a certain population to support. For example, Meldreth, Foxton and Shepreth stations, which lie on the London to Cambridge line, could together provide homes for over 50,000 people—yet none of these stations is more than 12 minutes apart.
The introduction of new active transport routes, such as cycleways, could also be enabled through the acquisition of land either side of the existing railway, linking these new settlements by sustainable means.
It is not just stations within rural areas that should benefit from development. Transport for London has struggled with securing planning consent for some of its suburban stations.
Therefore, there should be the introduction of new policies to make such development easier. This might take the form of a “presumption in favour” of development close to all stations – including those in urban areas, where densities are significantly higher than those in the surrounding areas.
To mitigate the loss of open space in rural areas, for every hectare taken out of green belt for the purposes of development, an equivalent area could be included within it elsewhere, resulting in no net loss of protected space.
Building within ten minutes’ walk of England’s accessible stations could yield at least 1.2m homes, with the loss of just 680 square kilometres of green belt (in fact it grew by 242 sq km between 2022 and 2023 alone).
There are more reasons to build around stations than not. The mild inconvenience faced by those living in outlying areas who will be unable to use station car parks will be more than mitigated by the huge gains achieved through the provision of new homes, social infrastructure, increased productivity, and economic growth.
This article was first published in the Fabian Society pamphlet “Homes for Britain” in March 2023.
Perhaps we’ve been desensitised to the stark realities of the housing crisis, with the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the baby boomer generation (which, we need to remember, lived through very little genuine hardship in the post-war years) prevailing. But in other any functional democracy where 3.6 million young adults remained at home due to generational housing inequality, this would be a national scandal. According to some estimates, we are millions of homes short of where a country with our population should be.
The fact that none of the mainstream parties have yet to articulate a plan to address this crisis is a damning indictment of current political discourse. Not only is this a social failure, it’s an economic one too. Productivity in the UK is woefully low, with young people unable to relocate to where jobs are, or otherwise struggling with extended commutes. Worse still, a generation is delaying starting families as housing costs, employment precarity and overcrowding threaten to detonate a demographic time-bomb which nobody seems willing to defuse.
I live on the northern fringes of London, the final stop before the railway plunges into the capital’s green belt. In less than 30 minutes I can be in central London, on one of six or more trains that run every hour. There are many similar lines that extend out of London, providing convenient access both to the city and countryside for those who live close to them. It’s difficult to think of more appropriate locations for new homes.
Resistance to urban expansion is often (rightly) based on a fear of perpetuating low-density, car-dependent sprawl on the outskirts of our rural towns and villages. So it follows that, in order to create new homes less dependent on private vehicle ownership, we should instead look to optimise development around existing public transport networks. But how many homes might we build? And where?
Using various publicly-accessible data sources, I mapped every train station in England and examined the constraints on development around each. Anywhere at risk of flooding was excluded, as was land within national parks, existing urban areas, or those sites protected by landscape designations because of their quality or scientific interest. Green belt, though, I considered fair game: regardless of what the CPRE claims, it’s increasingly clear that we cannot deliver the homes we need on brownfield alone, and a pragmatic review of green belt policy is long overdue. Drawing an 800m radius around each station (equivalent to a 10 minute walk) and extracting constraints, I arrived at a pleasing 777 stations with development potential.
Not every one is close to a population centre, and some are used by only a handful of passengers each year. As there’s no easy method of measuring current or potential frequency of service, I pegged target densities to passenger annual numbers. Those stations closest to major cities were assigned 75 homes per hectare, those in remote areas much less. But even at modest densities this reveals a huge potential for delivering the new homes we need.
A case in point: Ashwell & Morden sits mid-way between London and Cambridge, with frequent services to both. Yet look at it on Google Maps and you’ll see the station is surrounded by little more than open fields. It’s not even in the green belt of either city. Even at modest densities, this site could accommodate 7,000 homes for some 30,000 people. Development of this scale, supported by a decent masterplan and robust design coding, could provide social infrastructure and sustainable travel for residents. And rolling out a similar approach to the rest of the country could be transformational in providing high-quality homes in sustainable locations such as this.
The familiar complaint from those in comfortable circumstances that we risk ‘concreting over the countryside’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when – even with these additional numbers – we’d lose less than 0.4 per cent of England’s rural space in the process (Britain’s roads take up around three times this area).
The coming general election could be a turning point in whether we take genuine steps to address generational inequality, particularly in respect of housing delivery. Building homes around rural stations won’t go the whole way to achieving this but, combined with other bold ideas, it could play a part.
This article was originally published in the Architects’ Journal.