Legacy in Practice Ep 3 Hartree with Frances Wright

This is Legacy in Practice, a podcast series from E.C.F. - Engage, Communicate, Facilitate.

In this episode, Oliver Deed travels to North Cambridge — to a quiet residential street called Marmalade Lane — where forty-two homes were designed alongside the people who now live in them.

It's a small project. But it carries a big idea.

Because just up the road sits the proposed Hartree masterplan — five thousand six hundred homes, alongside workplaces, schools and community facilities. And when the team behind that scheme began thinking about how to engage communities at scale, they looked here first.

Oliver is joined by Frances Wright, Head of Community Partnering at TOWN, and Tom Lord from the Sortition Foundation — whose work in deliberative recruitment helped shape the Ideas Exchange, a process designed to bring together residents who genuinely reflected the wider community, not just the most vocal voices.

The conversation moves from co-design and gentle density to the realities of sustaining participation across a long and uncertain planning timeline. What happens when engagement works — but the project stalls anyway? And what does meaningful participation actually leave behind?

This episode is about the difference between consultation as a stage in planning, and engagement as part of the design of a place itself.

A study in patience, process, and what communities can teach us — if we give them the time.

Legacy in Practice is a podcast series from E.C.F., documenting the projects, decisions, and relationships shaping places across the UK.

To learn more, visit engagecf.co.uk or follow E.C.F. on LinkedIn.

This episode is part of the E.C.F. podcast series, exploring how community engagement shapes real places.

To learn more about our work, visit engagecf.co.uk or follow E.C.F. on LinkedIn for updates, insights, and future episodes.