Great places

Through your feedback you told us we should make great places that people enjoy by ensuring high quality design, enhancing local landscapes, and protecting the historic environment. You also told us that great places are more than just about the design of buildings, but creating communities with access to services, facilities, nature and open spaces as well. 

Strategic Priority: Sustain the unique character and identities of Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire, and complement it with beautiful and distinctive development, creating a place where people want to live, work, visit and play. 

The combined areas of Cambridge District and South Cambridgeshire District Councils.

has beautiful architecture and public realm, historic assets ranging from the historical colleges of Cambridge though to village conservation areas, and valued landscapes. 

Maintaining and creating great places is crucial to sustaining the quality of the area for people who live, work, study in, and visit

The combined areas of Cambridge District and South Cambridgeshire District Councils.

. Great places are valued and distinctive, accessible to all people and well-integrated with nature. Valuing place in this local plan aims to ensure that all residents’ quality of life can be improved while enhancing the global excellence of its knowledge economy and the preservation of the area’s heritage assets. 

Our new developments need to protect what is special and deliver high quality and well-designed buildings and spaces that combine to form great places. We continue to use the Cambridgeshire Quality Charter for Growth to provide a clear and consistent basis for securing quality new developments. Themes covering the four ‘C’s’ of Community, Connectivity, Climate and Character have been used to provide an understanding of what needs to be considered when creating and assessing high quality design. 

Given the strong track record of delivering high quality design in the

The combined areas of Cambridge District and South Cambridgeshire District Councils.

area, evidenced through award winning schemes and overall growth delivery, the themes from the Charter have been used to structure policies in the Great Places chapter. 

• Set design principles around the Cambridgeshire Quality Charter for Growth. 
• Provide quality guidelines that development must meet to deliver good design. 
• Ensure that land is used effectively in delivering appropriate housing density. 
• Establish how proposals for taller buildings and their impact on the skyline will be considered. 
• Require developments to deliver high quality landscape and public realm. 
• Protect and enhance landscape character. 
• Provide a strategy for the historic environment, setting out the approach to considering impacts on designated and non-designated heritage assets. 
• Ensure that development protects and enhances the significance of archaeological sites. 
• Support the adaptation of heritage buildings to climate change. 
• Outline requirements for new and existing shopfronts. 

We will consider all comments while developing the next version of the

A plan for the future development of a local area, drawn up by the local planning authority in consultation with the community. In law this is described as the development plan documents adopted under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. A local plan can consist of either strategic or non-strategic policies, or a combination of the two.

.

All comments must be received by 30 January 2026 at 5pm.