Imagine a city full of wooden towers, that’s fully 6G and is predominantly powered by the sun. That’s the vision for Forest City 1 – a new metropolis that’s been proposed for Cambridgeshire. ‘This isn’t another housing development,’ its website says. ‘It's a complete reimagining of how we can live, work, and thrive in the 21st century.’
The city has been devised by Shiv Malik, a former investigative journalist, and Joe Reeve, a co-founder of grassroots political movement Looking for Growth. They reckon it’s the solution to the housing crisis and growing disillusion across the UK.
Malik told the Independent: ‘Britain needs growth, truly affordable housing and also a massive reboot on infrastructure. My generation of millennials and younger have been utterly exasperated with all these issues for over a decade.’
The pair have identified a 45,000 acre spread of land for the city, which sits on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border between Newmarket and Haverhill. Their current plans envision a place the size of Bristol with skyscrapers made of industrial wood, a 6G network and a multi-line tram and metro system. It would be powered by solar and small modular reactors and be surrounded by 12,000 acres of deciduous woodland.
Houses in Forest City would be ‘the highest quality, four-bed, Passivhaus townhouses, all-electric, with an American style specification for appliances’ and, thanks to cheap construction, would each cost £350,000. It’s hoped that the city will eventually have 400,000 homes and one million residents.
Malik and Reeve want to fill the metropolis with ‘Britain’s most ambitious families’, with 30 percent of its first cohort of residents selected on merit – people who ‘want to live well and be part of building the future’. Then, 40 percent of its housing will be allocated to employees of commercial tenants, 15 percent on a first-come-first-served basis, five percent via a lottery and three percent on a needs basis.
It may sound like an insanely ambitious pipe dream but Malik and Reeve are adamant that ‘the impossible is only impossible until someone builds it’. They’ve already got backing from the likes of Patricia Hewitt, a former secretary of state for trade and health and Tim Leunig, a highly respected advisor to multiple chancellors.
Not everyone is convinced by the idea. Nick Timothy, Conservative MP for West Suffolk, described the idea as ‘ridiculous’ and one senior regeneration specialist told the Telegraph that they ‘fear the idea is completely bonkers’. Maxwell Marlow, of think tank the Adam Smith Institute added: ‘It’s wonderful thinking, I’m fully behind it. However, do I think this is going to happen? No, because there are viability concerns about planning and policy.’
If it does go ahead, Forest City would be the UK’s first new city in more than 50 years (the last one was Milton Keynes, completed in 1967) and is projected to cost a staggering £100 billion (Malik and Reeve say it’ll be privately funded). Formal plans haven’t been submitted yet. The project is still in the early phase of proving that there is public demand, asking for support via a pledge.
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