Homes proposed for Vauxhall site

The company no longer needs the 60-acre storage site, and submitted its proposals to Central Bedfordshire Council over the summer to be included in the authority’s news housing growth strategy.

Yesterday (Weds) representatives from Vauxhall and communications firm PPS will meet with local councillors and residents from Chaul End village to ask their opinions on what should be built on the site, which is opposite Caddington Golf Club.

Vauxhall European real estate manager Julian Lyon said: “We went for 450 homes – you could fit 600 to 700 on there if you were just squeezing them in.

“It is a question of finding out people’s priorities and concerns, rather than just saying, ‘We’ve teamed up with a house builder and we’re going to get 600 houses on there’.

“But the key thing is that the community should have their say.”

Juilan Seymour from PPS said: “Vauxhall have a long history of working in the town and are trying to make something which everyone would be proud of.

“We are starting from the point of view of what could be on the site, and then asking people what their aspirations are and what they want to see there.”

Mr Lyon said the Bushwood Green proposals for 5,000 homes on land adjacent to the Vauxhall site were “inconvenient” because “there is a feeling that (the Vauxhall proposals) are a wedge in the door”.

“But this is a discrete site contained within its own environment, whereas Bushwood was an extension of Luton,” he said.

Vauxhall has used the site since the 1950s, first as a testing track and then to store vehicles from its Luton manufacturing plants.

Mr Lyon said the company’s production approach had changed from manufacturing vehicles and storing them to “ideally finding buyers and then making the vehicles”.

>Click here to read our last story about the site’s future