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Tuesday 20th May 2008
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Bradley Stoke is a large development first planned in the 1970s. It comprises 1,000 acres of land that incorporate 650 acres for housing. One hundred acres have been set aside for employment purposes and there are 180 acres of major public open space. 1n 1984 the name 'Bradley Stoke' was chosen, deriving from Bradley Brook and Stoke Brook, which flow through the area. John Cope, then MP for Northavon, cut the first turf in March 1987 with a JCB excavator instead of the traditional spade. Bradley Stoke really began to take shape in 1988 with about 10% of the area in the north encompassing light industrial and commercial development.
Bradley Stoke is nearing its target of some 8,500 houses, a population of 25,000, seven schools, playing fields, shops and a variety of leisure services. To date, six primary schools have opened and the secondary school is under construction and it's opening date is anticipated for September 2005.
The M5 to the north and the M4 to the east form two boundaries of Bradley Stoke. The more-or-less straight line of the B4057 (known as Winterbourne Road) forms the southern boundary where Bradley Stoke borders Stoke Gifford and the meandering line of Orpheus and Braydon Avenues roughly form the western boundary alongside Little Stoke and Patchway. The motorways were cut through the parish of Almondsbury in the 1960s and separated over 200 acres from the main part of the ancient parish which now lies to the north of what is called the 'Almondsbury Interchange'.
The area of land in the north of Bradley Stoke that used to be part of Almondsbury parish now comprises about a fifth of the new parish of Bradley Stoke. There is a small area of land that was once part of Patchway. The remainder came from Stoke Gifford apart from a tiny triangle of land in the bottom southeast corner, now occupied by a factory, which was once in Winterbourne. Only a few of the pre-1987 dwellings exist and these include a small hamlet in a road known as The Common (East), where Manor Farm used to be. Much of the area was low-grade farmland although a number of attractive natural features such as Savage's Wood, Webb's Wood and Sherbourne's Brake have been incorporated. There are four brooks running through the town with landscaped areas around them and a new lake has been constructed.
Bradley Stoke, unlike many new housing areas, has been planned on a largely self-standing basis, rather than as an extension to an existing community. In May 1990, Christine Lambert (University of Bristol) wrote:
"The concentration of new house building on a small number of large green-field sites is a distinctive feature of planning policy in Avon. It is in part a response to the politics of new house building (the political controversy generated by allocating sites for housing on the edge of small towns and villages) and also a response to the problem of providing infrastructure to support new development. The large-scale investment required of developers in roads and water supply particularly, is only feasible for very large-scale developments." (Excerpt taken from 'New Housebuilding and the Development Industry in the Bristol Area' by Christine Lambert, School for Advanced Urban Studies - Working Paper 86, University of Bristol May 1990)
Development of the new town began from the two ends of Bradley Stoke, with the construction of major residential areas to the south near Stoke Gifford and to the north near Almondsbury. Building from both ends in this way enabled the new houses to be reached from existing roads and obviated the need for the entire infrastructure to be in place before the housing developers could see a return on their investment.
