Didcot Garden Town

In 2015 Didcot was one of the first towns to be awarded garden town status by the UK government. Led by South Oxfordshire and the Vale of White Horse district councils, Futurecity was appointed to lead the vision, brand and identity of the Didcot Garden Town Delivery Plan as part of a consultant team.

The garden town ambition is to support Didcot’s growth to sustainably deliver 20,000 new jobs and 15,000 new homes. The town and wider Science Vale are home to world-class research facilities such as the Diamond Light Source and are set within the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The Delivery Plan supported this important part of the UK economy, and worked with local people in Didcot to ensure that benefits to the community within the plan were maximised.

Futurecity led the project visioning and key stakeholder engagement to drive the projects ambition and its ability to galvanise inspiring collaboration across its science, cultural, and environmental communities. Partnership working across grassroots communities and leading international research centres developed new ideas for transforming Didcot’s USP’s of inspirational science and technology, fantastic green space amenity, and diverse cultural communities. Against very real short-term challenges, Futurecity developed a series of quick win project proposals to capture the vision on the ground, and enable realisable goals to build advocacy and agency amongst the towns residents and workers. These embraced food production, alternative mobility networks and routes, cross-disciplinary hub spaces for knowledge transfer and collaboration, and a town-wide cultural strategy.