Midlands & East Anglia NHBC Awards

The sun is shining on Summers Field as Terry Brand wins an NHBC award

Rural living and city access will be combined in a new development by award-winning David Wilson Homes. Site manager Terry Brand has now been recognised for the site’s success after winning a coveted NHBC Pride in the Job Award.

The Summers Field development on Ermine Street is in the thriving village of Papworth Everard, just 12 miles from the beautiful city of Cambridge. In total David Wilson Homes will construct 365 new homes, comprising a mixture of two, three, four and five-bedroom houses. The project began onsite in April 2011 and is expected to last for around 3 years.

Site manager and NHBC award winner, Terry Brand, commented:

“This is a cracking project which is held in very high esteem. The location is ideal for commuters as it is only ten minutes away from a railway station, yet it is technically still in the countryside. We have had a lot of sales so far, and the range of houses allows the development to cater for anyone from first-time buyers to the executive market.”

David Wilson Homes is keen to utilise the rural location and beautiful surroundings, and the homes are therefore situated within an attractive open space with wide roads and walkways. As a result, residents may enjoy village life whilst being within easy reach of Cambridge and London – with the nearby A1, A14 and M11 making travel easy and accessible.

The company is a division of Barratt Homes, which was established in 1958. Barratt Homes is now recognised as the country’s best house builder, having won a host of industry awards in recent years. They were named ‘Housebuilder of the Year 2012’ at the industry’s most prestigious awards, which are organised by the Home Builders Federation and ‘Housebuilder’ – the UK’s best-read housebuilding magazine. In their feedback, the judges recognised Barratt Homes as an “outstanding all-rounder” that is consistently “showing its prowess in the fields of zero carbon, regeneration, design and landscaping.”

David Wilson Homes are putting this expertise into practice on the Summers Field site, as Terry Brand explained:

“Although we have encountered a few minor challenges, the project has progressed well so far. An initial challenge was gaining planning permission – this took six years, so the project was in the pipeline for a while. In addition, we built a feature entrance that the council unfortunately requested that we removed.

“To date, we have constructed just over 40 units and are laying the roads as we go. The rural location has made the project particularly interesting, and each of the challenges – including a brook that we will deal with later in the project – has just added to the interest of the project.”

The Summers Field development is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2014.

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