Frome residents win five-year battle for community-led housing project
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Mayday Saxonvale scheme is given the go-ahead after an extraordinary meeting of town council executive. Residents of a “renegade” Somerset market town have won their battle to create an innovative 5-hectare (12-acre) community-led development that includes homes, workspaces and a lido, after county councillors agreed to sell a large brownfield site to the not-for-profit social enterprise behind the project.
![[An empty plot of land with mud tracks ]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ff0b0cc4cbfb3ef31bb5a6ecf3eb5d3cf30504b6/0_3_1024_614/master/1024.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The Mayday Saxonvale scheme in Frome, which hundreds of residents have spent five years fighting for, also features two public squares, and a community-owned boutique hotel and cafe. Supporters of the project, which they believe is the largest of its kind in England, say it means that the Saxonvale site in the town centre will be saved from being turned into a “cookie-cutter” development by a commercial company more focused on its shareholders than the good of the place.
![[An artists sketch of a housing development with people walking through it]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/085a97202a389befb3c4fde53514b37eddf29e7f/0_616_1870_1122/master/1870.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Fiona Barrows, a Frome town councillor, said: “What’s really exciting for me is that it’s not actually about the amount of commercial space or the affordable housing it will provide – it’s about the sense of confidence and agency and possibility that I think it will give us as a community.”.
The council decision was greeted with protracted applause, with supporters hugging and kissing. Council leader Bill Revans said he had never had such a positive reaction to a planning decision. The progress of the scheme is being watched keenly by other progressive towns who hope they may be able to replicate it.
