A Million New Neighbours: What Forest City Would Mean for All of Us
It’s not just the villages inside the red line. If you live anywhere between Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket, Haverhill and Cambridge, this is about your town, your weekends, your roads, your water and your countryside.
It’s a crisp Sunday in October. You load the dog into the car and head to Ickworth for a walk under the turning leaves. The car park is full, and so is the overflow field. The café queue runs out of the door, and the path you love is shoulder to shoulder.
Now imagine it’s like that every weekend.
That’s a realistic picture of what happens when you build a city of one million people a short drive from the places we love. That’s the size of Birmingham, set down between Newmarket and Haverhill and over the border into Cambridgeshire. Cambridge, for comparison, has around 150,000 residents.
Forest City at a glance:
Housing: about 21,000 acres
Commercial space: 8,000 acres for offices, labs and light industry
Reservoir: a 1,600-acre reservoir near Great Bradley
Land: built on what the developers call “grade 2 arable land”
Timescale: 25 years to reach 80% capacity in the fastest case, and 40–50 years in the slower ones
All figures from the developers’ own report, We Can Build a City.
From market towns to suburbs
For centuries, Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket and Haverhill have been places in their own right. Each has its own market, high street, character and identity. Cambridge has been the region’s city.
Forest City would change that. At a million people, it would be about 23 times the size of Bury St Edmunds, 35 times the size of Haverhill and 50 times the size of Newmarket. It would be nearly seven times the size of Cambridge. Put all four together and you have roughly 242,500 people. Forest City would be more than four times that, in one place.
The developers are open about what they want to be the centre of gravity. Their plan includes a 1,300-acre Central Business District with “room for monumental architecture,” and they write: “As Stanford University is to Silicon Valley, so Cambridge University shall be to Forest City.” In that picture, even Cambridge plays a supporting role.
Their own nature report draws its circles around our towns. A 10-mile radius from the city centre “would encompass Newmarket and Haverhill.” A 15-mile radius takes in Bury St Edmunds, Mildenhall, Soham, Saffron Walden, Sudbury and the eastern side of Cambridge.
When a city that size sits at the centre, the towns around it risk becoming its suburbs. They would be where people sleep, park and shop on the way to somewhere else. Planners elsewhere have seen the pattern. Milton Keynes’s own transport modelling found that jobs growing faster than housing fuelled car journeys from outside the city into its centre, putting extra stress on the roads leading in. Transport for New Homes warns of a “doughnut effect,” “whereby everything ends up on out-of-town greenfield sites whilst brownfield sites lie unbuilt and derelict, and high streets are dying.”
Imagine Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket and Haverhill becoming “outer Forest City.”
How Forest City could change your week
Your weekend day out. Ickworth had 337,000 visitors in 2023, up by more than 40,000 on the year before. The National Trust says it is already looking at how to improve infrastructure and visitor experience as numbers grow. That’s before a million new neighbours arrive.
This isn’t guesswork. A study of protected sites found that “more housing consistently means more visitors to protected sites, across most habitats.” For sites people drive to, housing within 15 km was also a significant predictor of visitor numbers.
Your dog walk. Imagine your favourite footpath crowded, churned up and littered. In the New Forest, researchers estimated that a 16.4% increase in housing within 25km would lead to around 11.4% more visits to its protected countryside. Forest City wouldn’t add 16% to our area. It would add a million people, more than four times the combined population of Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket, Haverhill and Cambridge. Heavier use takes its toll. Researchers list “disturbance to wildlife, trampling leading to changes in vegetation, soil compaction and erosion, increased fire risk or enrichment and contamination from dog faeces.”
Your Saturday in town. Imagine heading to Bury St Edmunds market, only to sit in traffic and then circle for a parking space. Or settling down for a picnic in Abbey Gardens and finding the lawns packed and noisy.
The gardens are already the most visited free attraction in the East of England, with more than 1.3 million visits in 2023. That’s the draw a 14-acre garden has today, in a town of around 44,000 people. Research on parks and protected sites near new housing finds that the number of visits rises with the number of people living nearby. Forest City would put a million people, 23 times Bury’s population, within the developers’ own 15-mile zone, which takes in Bury St Edmunds. Our parks, markets and high streets were sized for the towns they serve, not for a new city next door.
Your drive in. The developers’ own transport report admits that “the existing A14 and M11 corridors are already at capacity” and warns that car-based planning at this scale “would be gridlock.” Their answer is 8,000 park-and-ride spaces at Dullingham, Haverhill, the A11/A1307 and the city’s eastern edge, to “intercept” cars. Those cars still have to get there, and they’ll use our country lanes to do it.
Your commute to Cambridge. Cambridge is already third in the UK for time lost in traffic, at 122 hours a year per driver. In 2025 Cambridge bucked the national trend, with traffic delays rising 15 per cent year-over-year. The developers picture people getting about by train, tram and bicycle, with “car-free mobility as the default option.” But their trams and rail extensions are still at the feasibility stage.
Experience elsewhere isn’t encouraging. Transport for New Homes visited new developments across England. It found that “despite plans for vibrant communities with local shops, leisure facilities and community services, the visions of developers have not materialised. Equally, the excellent public transport promised was often not in place and in some cases had been reduced.” Even Milton Keynes, Britain’s best-known planned city, has “a high car mode share for journey to work relative to other urban local authorities.”
Your school run and your GP. This would be a building site for a generation. The reservoir alone is expected to take “around 5–6 years” to build and employ “around 2,000 workers.” At Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, a 2025 report found that “of the 10,000 homes originally planned, only 1,500 have been built since work began eight years ago – and basic infrastructure is lagging far behind.” Residents reported “still no GP surgery, limited bus connections and ongoing roadworks.” Imagine construction lorries in your village, and the GP, dentist and supermarket in your town taking on demand from a city whose own facilities haven’t been built yet.
Your garden in a dry summer. East Anglia is the driest region in the UK, receiving less than 600mm of rainfall a year. Summer 2026 brought hosepipe bans across the region. Forest City would need an extra 160–175 megalitres of water every day, by the developers’ own estimate. Imagine the next hosepipe ban with a million more people drawing on the same water.
The bigger picture
The River Stour
The Climate Change Committee warns that by 2055, under 2°C of warming, England faces “a five billion litre per day shortfall for public water supplies.” It also says chalk streams “are already at risk from increasing temperatures and drought.”
The upper Stour is already under strain. National river-flow records note that its runoff is reduced by public water supply (predominantly for Haverhill), industrial and agricultural abstraction from surface water and groundwater. In Greater Cambridge, the Environment Agency has advised that “any new development that takes place must not increase abstraction and risk deterioration to water bodies,” and water shortages have already delayed development there.
The developers’ main answer is a reservoir in the Stour catchment, filled from the Great Ouse, which they say could be running by “2040–2045.” In Parliament, the local MP said: “when I wrote to Anglian Water, it said that the developers had not even been in touch.”
The deer and the skylarks
Ask anyone who walks our fields at dusk what they love, and many will mention the deer at the edge of a wood, hares in spring, skylarks overhead and owls along the hedgerows. All of them need space and quiet.
According to State of Nature 2023, the UK is already “one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth,” and the species studied have declined on average by 19% since 1970. Planning specialists who work on protected sites describe the damage that follows new homes as “the cumulative effect of daily recreation: dogs off lead through nesting areas, informal paths widening, fires, cats hunting near the boundary, and disturbance that pushes birds off feeding grounds during the hours they need to feed.”
The developers’ nature report says that to grow its new forest, “culling of deer and the reintroduction of natural predators should play a significant role in reducing browsing pressure,” along with “fencing to keep out deer where necessary.”
To be fair, managing visitor pressure can work when it’s taken seriously and funded. On the Thames Basin Heaths, Natural England reports that “despite significant housing growth and increased visitor numbers across the area, protected bird populations have remained stable.” But that was ordinary housing growth, not a new city of a million people.
Our farmland and our food
Even the developers admit it: “loss of farmland can be somewhat mitigated against, but not nearly in full. For those who think food security a primary issue, building on grade 2 arable land will be unforgivable.”
We do think it’s a primary issue. The Climate Change Committee says “around 40% of the food we eat is imported.” It projects that, without adaptation, the share of high-quality farmland in England and Wales could fall “from an average of around 40% of land… to just over 10% by 2050.” UK wheat and oat yields were already “over 10% lower than the 10-year average” after the hot, dry summer of 2025.
According to CPRE, the East of England has lost 3,232 hectares of its Best and Most Versatile farmland since 2010, “the greatest absolute loss within a single region.” Once it’s built on, it’s gone for good.
The people inside the red line
The developers themselves refer to “the irrevocable effect this will have on the lives of the 8,000 people who live in the 24 villages directly within the Forest City boundary.” The land would be assembled by a development corporation with compulsory purchase powers. In Parliament, the area was described as being “where today stand ancient villages, communities built on trust and reciprocity, beautiful countryside, family businesses, new tech firms, the international headquarters of horseracing and breeding, and the best arable farmland in the country.”
Imagine a letter telling you that the home, farm or business your family built is now earmarked for a new city.
This affects all of us
Forest City is sometimes presented as something that happens “over there,” to a few villages. But its effects would reach our footpaths, our beauty spots, our towns, our roads, and the rivers and aquifers we all rely on.
We can’t prove exactly how it would play out, because it hasn’t been built. But every example here comes from what has happened elsewhere, from public research, or from the developers’ own report. These are realistic outcomes, not scare stories.
We support new homes in our region: well-planned, at the right scale, and in the right places, with the roads, water, schools and GPs in place to serve them. Forest City is none of those things.
If you care about this corner of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire and want it to grow in the right way, now is the time to speak up.
1. Sign the petition. Add your name to the petition to stop Forest City, started by West Suffolk MP Nick Timothy. It takes less than a minute, and every signature shows that the people who live here do not agree.
(We are an independent, non-party campaign. We’re sharing this petition because it gives local people a clear way to make their opposition heard. It is hosted on Nick Timothy’s own website, and you don’t need to opt in to any party updates to sign it).
2. Write to your MP. It doesn’t matter which party they’re from. MPs listen when constituents write to them in their own words. A few lines is enough:
Say where you live and what you love about it: the walk, the market, the river, the view.
Pick one or two of the concerns above that matter most to you, such as traffic, water, wildlife, farmland, or your town becoming a suburb.
Ask your MP to state publicly where they stand on Forest City, and to oppose it.
You can find your MP and their contact details on the UK Parliament website by entering your postcode.
3. Share this post. Forward it to a neighbour, post it in your village or town group, or bring it up at the school gate. Most people living just outside the red line still don’t know what’s being proposed on their doorstep.
A million new neighbours is not a small change. Let’s make sure our voices are heard before decisions are made for us.
Sources and further reading
UK Parliament, Hansard: Forest City: West Suffolk, House of Commons debate, 23 June 2026. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-06-23/debates/49C502FA-AE8A-4B93-A41F-61A0329040A0/forest-city-west-suffolk
Forest City 1, We Can Build a City, April 2026 (the developers’ report). https://rfei7ngbbsmt5ysk.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/we-can-build-a-city-pub.pdf
East Anglian Daily Times, “Suffolk’s Ickworth Estate welcomed record visitor numbers in 2023”, 17 March 2024. https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/24190732.suffolks-ickworth-estate-welcomed-record-visitor-numbers-2023/
Weitowitz, D.C. et al., “The effect of urban development on visitor numbers to nearby protected nature conservation sites”, Journal of Urban Ecology, 2019. https://academic.oup.com/jue/article/5/1/juz019/5602629
New Forest National Park Authority / Footprint Ecology, Research into recreational use of the New Forest’s protected habitats, 2020. https://www.newforestnpa.gov.uk/planning-home-page/planning-policy/mitigating-impacts-on-protected-areas/research-into-recreational-use-of-the-new-forests-protected-habitats/
Transport for New Homes, Building Car Dependency, February 2022. https://www.transportfornewhomes.org.uk/new-cowpat-housing-developments-are-adding-to-traffic-congestion-and-locking-communities-into-car-dependency/
Milton Keynes Council, Plan:MK Transport Topic Paper, March 2018. https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Transport%20Topic%20Paper%20March%202018%20MKTOP003.pdf
TomTom Traffic Index, Cambridge (2025 data). https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/city/cambridge/
Business Weekly, “Cambridge traffic congestion rising 15 per cent year-over-year” (reporting the INRIX 2025 Global Traffic Scorecard), 1 December 2025. https://www.businessweekly.co.uk/posts/cambridge-traffic-congestion-rising-15-per-cent-year-over-year
Cambs News Daily, “Northstowe residents left waiting as Cambridgeshire’s ‘new town’ struggles to find its soul” (citing The Telegraph), 13 September 2025. https://cambs-news.co.uk/northstowe-residents-left-waiting-as-cambridgeshires-new-town-struggles-to-find-its-soul/
State of Nature Partnership, State of Nature 2023. https://stateofnature.org.uk/
PlanScope, “European sites, recreational pressure and greenspace”, September 2026. https://planninglabs.co.uk/blog/european-sites-recreational-pressure-and-greenspace
Natural England, “Protecting the Thames Basin Heaths: evidence from 15 years of the SAMM Project”, 16 September 2026. https://naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2026/09/16/protecting-the-thames-basin-heaths-evidence-from-15-years-of-the-samm-project/
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology with Anglian Water, “Drier future for East Anglia’s wildlife, but action can help”, August 2026. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ee6194bd119d4c6dbdb74ea231c15a74
Essex & Suffolk Rivers Trust, “Drought in Essex and Suffolk: why our rivers need us to save water”, August 2026. https://www.essexsuffolkriverstrust.org/post/drought-in-essex-and-suffolk-why-our-rivers-need-us-to-save-water
Climate Change Committee, A Well-Adapted UK: the Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk (CCRA4-IA), May 2026. https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/A-Well-Adapted-UK-CCRA4-IA-784y9813-3094039i85t59yhfufoub24f2bipdj1.pdf
National River Flow Archive, Station 36015 – Stour at Lamarsh. https://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/data/station/info/36015
GOV.UK, Addressing water scarcity in Greater Cambridge: update on government measures, March 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/addressing-water-scarcity-in-greater-cambridge-update-on-government-measures/addressing-water-scarcity-in-greater-cambridge-update-on-government-measures
Water Resources East, Cambridge Water Scarcity Group. https://wre.org.uk/cambridge-water-scarcity-group/
CPRE, Building on our food security, July 2022. https://www.cpre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Building-on-our-food-security.pdf
Transport for New Homes, What is being built in 2025? In search of the station, March 2025. https://www.transportfornewhomes.org.uk/jigsaw-puzzle-developments-are-creating-car-dependent-estates/
Approximate populations: Haverhill 28,500, Newmarket 20,000, Bury St Edmunds 44,000, Cambridge 150,000. Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/
Visit Bury St Edmunds, “Abbey Gardens in Top 20 Most Visited Free Attractions in England and Top in the East of England” (reporting VisitEngland’s 2023 Annual Survey of Visits to Visitor Attractions). https://visit-burystedmunds.co.uk/blog/abbey-gardens-in-top-20-most-visited-free-attractions-in-england-and-top-in-the-east-of-england
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