Buckskin and South Ham: Looking ahead after a busy year
It’s been an incredibly busy and rewarding year of meeting and speaking with residents across Basingstoke. As a locally-based housing association and landlord of affordable homes, we want to bring additional investment to improve local neighbourhoods and increase the opportunities for everyone who lives here. We have spent most of this year listening to residents’ views about the future of Buckskin and South Ham while bringing forward exciting plans to build more affordable housing at the former Camrose stadium and Saxon Court, our former head office on Sarum Hill.
Across all of these projects, we know listening, learning, and understanding the different perspectives of those who live and work in the area is crucial. While they will go on for a number of years, at every step of the way, the community will have the opportunity to input and respond to our plans.
In Buckskin and South Ham, we have been in conversation with residents about ideas for a shared future vision since 2023, and this year we significantly ramped up our efforts to hear from as many people as possible as we started to develop our plans for the area. I’ve been grateful to see firsthand the wide range of views coming together to work productively through this process, including constructive input from community groups.
As a result of this engagement, we will be ready to share the first set of priorities for Buckskin and South Ham early next year. Ahead of that I wanted to provide some insight on what has brought us to this point.
Over the last two years, our website has been visited more than 33,000 times for people to find out more about this project and share feedback. More than 1,400 residents have come to 33 events, and more than 1,800 residents filled in one of our surveys. We’ve also had over 1,200 conversations with residents through our door-knocking programme. There has been a growing interest as we have met more residents and spread the word, with a significant increase in event attendance since we began.
Our starting point was identifying shared ambitions for Buckskin and South Ham. From our conversations with residents, we understood these as: renewing homes and streets where people can feel safe, improving the local economy and connectivity to the town centre, creating resilient and healthy neighbourhoods, and a proud and empowered community. These ambitions will continue to shape everything we do as we move forward to the next phases of this project.
We spent this summer meeting more residents through extra events and door-knocking to continue gathering feedback and updating on where the discussion had got to. Over autumn, we took a focused approach to Buckskin, South Ham and South Ham Extension as distinct neighbourhoods, hosting dedicated workshops to find out what is most important to people living in each specific area. Residents discussed ideas and opinions together, with different priorities emerging for each neighbourhood regarding housing, local services and facilities like healthcare, community spaces and shopping.
We have also kicked off the latest round of our Community Co-Design Associates programme, which started last year and helps us get a deeper understanding of residents’ experiences and expertise. It provides residents with introductory skills and training in urban design, the planning system in England, and community engagement and co-design. These skills are then applied through a series of sessions reviewing, critiquing and analysing ideas to help shape future proposals.
We have been similarly engaging young people through our Young Design Academy programme, which brought together over 50 young people aged between 16 and 23 from local schools and the Scouts to get their thoughts on the future of Buckskin and South Ham.
Our team is now reflecting on all the ideas and feedback we’ve heard, including through our co-design programme, which is still running over weekly sessions. In early 2026 we will be updating on our progress and how we intend to move forward through the next phase.
This is just the start of our consultation and engagement for this phased project, which will potentially take over 20 years to complete. Some areas will have an immediate focus for investment, while others may come later down the line. Throughout, we will be listening to residents’ ideas and feedback. In the meantime, we’ll continue to support residents, maintain and invest in homes and neighbourhoods, and address wellbeing.
For now, if you’d like to read more about the community insights that we’ve gathered through our conversations with residents since 2023, you can read the full report here.
Joe Marshall originally spoke to the Basingstoke Gazette.