26th August 2025.
Hartree project statement.
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We are hugely saddened by the UK Government’s decision to withdraw funding for the relocation of Cambridge’s Waste Water Treatment Plant. Without the relocation, Hartree – the new urban quarter planned for North East Cambridge – cannot be delivered. This decision comes on the back of Anglian Water’s successful application Development Consent Order, which approved the relocation in terms of land and planning. The decision to withdraw funding for the relocation followed significant increases in the expected relocation costs, which MHCLG has concluded are unaffordable.
TOWN has spent seven years bringing this project forward with Landsec, alongside landowners Anglian Water and Cambridge City Council, working closely with the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service. It is painful to have the project cancelled directly prior to the submission of the planning application, which was the product of many years of hard work by a universally respected client and design team.
Hartree set out to show how large-scale development could be done differently, in a city of global economic standing and huge importance to the UK Government’s national growth and productivity ambitions. It aimed to deliver a truly mixed-use new urban quarter that would have supported over 6,000 new jobs, green spaces, community amenities, and created thousands of homes including one of Cambridge’s largest ever contributions to affordable housing. The proposals set new standards in reducing daily car reliance in favour of active travel. They also placed sustainability at the centre of the design, from reusing existing site materials and setting ambitious low-carbon building targets, to an energy strategy focused on efficiency and renewables. These ideas sat alongside new approaches to living at higher density, with particular focus on how such extensions might provide liveable environments for people of all ages. The Hartree Child-Friendly Design Strategy set new standards for prioritising the needs of children and young people in design. We hope these ideas will feed into future development in Cambridge and beyond.
Throughout the project, TOWN worked closely with communities of North Cambridge, through a broad range of activities which have included a programme of engagement with local schools, regular meetings over three years with the Ideas Exchange (a community panel that has reviewed and helped shape our proposals), and the three-day People City Planet Festival which took place in 2022. Along with many of the thousands of local people we met and worked with during that process, we hoped and expected that Hartree would bring huge benefits to the wider city.
We would like to thank all those who worked with us to prepare the planning application and who’ve shaped the project along the way. Hartree has been a defining project for TOWN and it has been a privilege to have been at the forefront of a project that, in happier circumstances, would have transformed Cambridge’s future. We hope to be part of the conversation about how, if not through a project like Hartree, local and national ambitions for the sustainable growth of Cambridge can be realised.
