‘We have a longterm investment in the future of the community’

John Stuart, 21st Earl of Moray, landowner at Tornagrain

nagrain such as Forres and Nairn, including slate roofs, painted render walls and timber three-bay windows. These houses are not showy, but the materials used are an expense that is so often “value engineered” (developer speak for removed) from the picture by PLC developers looking to achieve their 20 per cent margins.

John Moray estimates the cost of building with quality materials to be about 20 per cent to 25 per cent more than a standard build. It’s a cost that others have been willing to stump up before. When the Dover House Estate in Putney was built in 1920, it was during a time when the government insisted on the best materials and provided the financial wherewithal to pay for them. The houses cost £1,150 to construct; about three times the amount of equivalent pre-war houses, according to John Broughton’s book Municipal Dreams.

“Landowners can take the long-term view, of course,” adds Pentreath, referring to something that’s become known as “landowner legacy” where landowners exert a certain level of control over projects, which can ensure the outcome enhances reputation and delivers desired financial, social and environmental returns. “They want to build something people will be proud of in generations to come,” continues Pentreath. “Public realm is important, that’s what creates a sense of place and builds value. Once people realise it’s somewhere rather than anywhere, house prices go up.”

A MODERN PORT TOWN

It’ll be years before any residents move in, but plans are afoot to create a picturesque town of classical buildings of 1,500 homes on a plot that was once home to Fawley power station, near Southampton. So far, the power station has been demolished, and huge infrastructure of fibre optic cables and new roads is currently being laid out. Described as a “an intelligent merchant city” – albeit a small one of 3,750 inhabitants – it lies within an AONB and on two miles of coastline. The position, says the man behind the development, Aldred Drummond, 44, of the neighbouring Cadland Estate, is unique: where the bucolic New Forest meets the industry of Southampton docks.

The power station at Fawley, completed in 1972, was built on land compulsorily purchased from his family, the founders of Drummonds Bank, in the late 1940s. When the land was put up for sale in 2015, the Drummond family had first refusal. Aldred founded Fawley Waterside Limited together with several investors to buy the plot as a joint venture. Plans today include converting the vast pit that once housed the turbine for the station – effectively a huge concrete box – into a basin and a 600-berth marina as well as underground parking for about 3,000 cars. This would mean that the buildings above can be designed at pre-20th-century density, without the need to accommodate cars.

Drummond says that he and the team looked at the late-Victorian planned towns of Port Sunlight and Bournville for inspiration: the aim is to integrate the building of homes with commerce, creating a place where people live and work.

As in other planned towns, houses will follow a design code. “We like to do things well and take a long-term view,” says Drummond. It’s an expensive approach, retrofitting a brownfield side and taking the quality-first approach to materials: Drummond estimates it to be about 75 per cent more expensive than building on greenfield. “We could have sold the land to a big house developer and made money, but the result would have been another sleeping suburb.”

Back in 2001, the Highland Council approached us because it was looking for land to house the growing population of Inverness and had identified a corridor between there and Nairn as a potential for development – we owned land in the corridor. We then started to think about what would be the appropriate solution and decided that having a community of a large scale on one site would be better than a series of smaller villages that would lack the critical mass to deliver services. By early 2006, the council agreed in outline to our proposal.

We don’t have shareholders so we can work on a different investment horizon to others. We own the site and the land around it which gives us a short-term advantage of not having to assemble it from a jigsaw puzzle of other sites.

Our challenge is geographical. Many of the emerging new communities are in the south of England where property values are higher and that provides landowners with more financial flex to get through the difficult early stages. But we don’t want to price people out of Tornagrain, so there’s less of a gap between the cost of delivery and the selling price we can ask. Here we have young first-time buyers through to young families and retirees, and while there are a few buyers from further afield – Germany being the furthest at the moment – the majority come from the local market.

The estate owns some property in the community, and we are keeping hold of the commercial premises to help guide the right occupants to the right place; it also means we have a long-term investment in the future of the community. But by the time the town is built, our share will be modest compared with the size of the town which will be managed by the Tornagrain Conservation Trust.