Welborne Garden Village
Sandwiched between the suburban sprawl of Fareham, and a section of the 42 kilometres of perpetual roadworks also known as the M27 motorway, there is, or there will be, Welborne “Garden Village”. At the moment, it’s 405 hectares of grassy hillsides, sparsely peppered with excavators and other builders junk. However, the glossy AI-generated video at the top of its website and the slick estate agent style blurb would have us believe this will be a “A beautiful new Garden Village of 6,000 homes perfectly positioned between the South Downs National Park and the Hampshire Coast.“
In any event, I ripped the video for future reference. It will be interesting to see if the final incarnation lives up to the initial hyperbole. Time will tell, I guess.
When it is complete, the development will include 6000 new homes, housing an estimated 15,000 people. In addition, there will be up to 10,000 square metres of retail space and over 100,000 square metres of business floor space. And of course, a major upgrade to M27 junction 10 is already in progress.
Gallery
Meantime, here are some pictures I captured earlier today. Frankly, I could have done with a longer lens really. I only had my tiny Lumix DMC-GX7 c/w a 12-32 mm vario. Still they are good enough to give an idea of the scale of the project. The photos are taken from the south side of the M27. However most of the development will take place to the north of the motorway.
Map of the area
OpenStreetMap
Unfortunately, despite national triangulation being funded with public money, the now privately-owned government company, Ordnance Survey still tries to extract more money from the public for use of its on-line maps. And they are painfully slow and clunky. Fortunately there is a perfectly adequate, zoomable, open source alternative. It is fast and you may use entirely for free:-
The above link is centred on the point at which I took the photographs, and I was looking approximately north. OpenStreetMap also offers a query view from which you can see additional information regarding the local environs.
geoURI
If you run Firefox, then you may wish to try this geoURI of the area. It should give you the option of opening the selected coordinates in a variety of mapping services and applications:-
NB. Currently only Firefox seems to support geoURI in a usable manner. Also, some mapping applications, such as KDE Marble may require you to zoom in , in order to see your selected location at a sane zoom-level.
Links
- Welborne Wikipedia page…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welborne,_Hampshire - Fareham Borough Council’s Welborne Pages…
https://www.fareham.gov.uk/welborne/intro.aspx - Downloadable PDF of the official Welborne plan…
https://www.fareham.gov.uk/PDF/planning/LP3WelborneAdopted.pdf - For a further explanation of geoURI please see…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme
