Boom town of the future

Known to most people as the new Eurostar station south of London, Ebbsfleet is also a prime example of modern regional development, as Rumyana Vakarelska reports

Ebbsfleet Valley is the largest development project in North Kent, backed by £3bn in private investment over 20 years. As well as the new residential area, which will include 10,000 new homes, five new schools and various cultural attractions, a large business park is expected to create 20,000 new jobs for the local residents.

The project is the brainchild of Land Securities, the UK’s largest estate trust. “We saw an unmissable development opportunity along Eurostar’s construction of the UK’s first high-speed link between the UK and mainland Europe from St Pancras in central London via Ebbsfleet in North Kent,” said Robin Pyle, development director at Land Securities. Ebbsfleet International station stands just 17 minutes away from London, while the trip from central London to Paris takes just an hour and 41 minutes. Brussels is just two hours and five minutes away.

Revealing the contestants in competition to design the new ‘Ebbsfleet landmark’, Pyle said that the £2m commission that will be granted by Land Securities to the winning artist would help put the project firmly on the map. The Ebbsfleet landmark will stand near the Springhead development and, it is hoped, will bring instant recognition to one of Britain’s newest residential towns. The competition is likely to generate crucial interest from home buyers in Springhead Park, the first residential development in Ebbsfleet Valley, where the first new houses went on sale earlier this year. The park consists of 600 home units, including flats and family houses, which are expected to sell at competitive prices ranging from £160,000 to £375,000.

The competition will give the UK public a chance to look at the proposed arts projects at Bluewater, the UK’s largest shopping centre, which is based at the opposite end of Ebbsfleet Valley from Springhead Park. A dedicated expert jury will make the final selection, which will be completed this autumn from a shortlist of five projects: Daniel Buren’s signal tower of five cubes and a laser beam; Richard Deacon’s painted steel latticework sculpture; Christopher Le Brun’s giant wing with a symbolic disc behind it; Mark Wallinger’s horse which is 33 times larger than life; and Rachel Whiteread’s recycled mountain topped by a house.

“The real test for the overall project will start next year when Southeastern trains will start their commuter service from Ebbsfleet to London in addition to the existing Eurostar services, which aim at different type of passengers,” said Pyle. Moreover, Pyle claims that companies paying high office space prices in Canary Wharf at the edge of the old city across the river Thames in east London will benefit, together with their employees, from moving close to Ebbsfleet International and will have a chance to invest in a more sustainable future. However, no company has yet indicated any interest, most likely because the new office buildings are not yet built.

The Ebbsfleet Valley project will also aim to help raise the living standards of  nearby towns such as Dartford and parts of east London, which have become little more than massive industrial estates surrounded by low-quality housing estates.

At a time when many new developments are criticised for their environmental impact, the designers of the Ebbsfleet Valley project believe that the closure of the cement quarries and paper factories that used to occupy the 420 hectares – an area three times the size of Hyde Park in central London – will in fact bring environmental benefits to the region.

“We do not have any figures yet that tell us exactly how many people are expected to use the newly opened Ebsfleet International station, but we know that the Eurostar has become the world’s first railway operator to make all passenger journeys carbon neutral and that the future of passenger travel in the UK and Europe will be in rail services,” said Richard Brown, CEO of Eurostar UK.

He said that in this context Eurostar has made its own suggestions to the UK government, which is holding a public consultation on the controversial third runway at Heathrow airport in west London and its likely impact on London and the south-east of England.

The Eurostar has carried 80 million passengers since it started services in 1994 and transported 8.2 million passengers under the Channel in 2007 alone. These steadily growing figures have been used both by Eurostar and Land Securities to justify the creation of the new station in Ebbsfleet, named after the local river. Moreover, Eurostar’s Ebbsfleet International terminus sits in a catchment area stretching throughout the home counties (the traditional commuter belt for London) – a potential travelling public of more than 10 million people. All these factors are likely to make Ebbsfleet International a focal point for all North Kent passengers, not just those on their way to mainland Europe.

Although derided by some as little more than a station in the middle of nowhere, history shows that the Ebbsfleet Valley has long been a residential area: indeed, archaeological finds in the area date from the Stone Age and include evidence of elephant hunters and the remnants of the first horizontal watermill wheel discovered in England. But despite the promising start, local councillors remain cautious about the prospects for Ebbsfleet.

Jeremy Kite, leader of neighbouring Dartford council, has warned that Ebbsfleet must not become another Ingress Park, a new development for about 3000 people in the same borough which has so far failed to generate any form of coherent community.
It is a challenge that Landmark Securities and its key partners are still to face – but one they believe they can rise to.