22nd December 2025

Forest City 1 is an ambitious project to build an affordable new city east of Cambridge, which will house 1 million people in 400,000 affordable homes. The forest will be core to its design and function.

Richard Beresford, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders (NFB), said, “Forest City 1 is a chance for the UK to reinvent placemaking, land use and the planning system. Done right, it will serve as a blueprint for growth and solve some of the greatest challenges the nation faces like the housing emergency, nature depletion and the skill crisis. We back this proposal as it will help change thinking about how we tackle these problems.”

Forest City 1 (working name) is set up in four phases:

Phase 1: ‘Foundation and Feasibility’ (1 to 10 months), where Albion City Development Corporation Ltd will be set up and advisory boards and experts will be assembled
Phase 2: ‘Detailed Planning and Coalition Building’ (10 to 24 months), which completes the project blueprint and establishes the business case and legal mechanisms
Phase 3: ‘Political Approval and Final Preparations’ (2 to 4 years), where Parliamentary passage of enabling legislation and investment agreements are agreed.
Phase 4: ‘Implementation and Delivery’ (4+ years), where land agreements are sought and ground is broken

The project will use community land trust models to deliver homes and attract employers and residents in a model akin to the worker estates of the industrial revolution. By putting nature at the heart of the city’s design, it will include a focus on public and active travel as well as net zero and ecologically beneficial housing.

The heart of that design is a forest, which creates a more holistic, medieval-style woodland, where woods, heath, grassland and wetland exist to support nature, people and natural resources.

Beresford continued, “Forest City 1’s creators are clearly thinking about how abundant nature and healthy communities can and should co-exist. It is a concept that many individual policies try to enable but as they are siloed, fail to achieve. This provides a chance for this Government, who has a mission to enable growth and solve the housing crisis, to leave a mark as well-loved as the NHS.

“For the construction industry, the prospect of decades of work is incredibly exciting and will help train the hundreds of thousands of construction workers our country needs. And, because quality is a theme which runs throughout the project, the nation’s SME housebuilders and regional contractors – particularly members of the NFB, who helped build Britain’s Victorian cities – know they will be viewed as key to meeting the high standards Forest City 1 demands.”