Episode 4 — Harlow & Gilston Garden Town

What does it take to build a public conversation around a development that didn't yet exist — in a town with no local newspaper left to tell the story?

In this episode of Legacy in Practice, Oliver Deed walks through Harlow town centre with Matt Phillips, Principal Communication and Engagement Officer at Harlow and Gilston Garden Town. The project spans five councils, two counties, more than 23,000 homes, and over a billion pounds of infrastructure investment. When Matt joined in 2019, there was no social media presence, no public narrative, and no community conversation. Just a government designation and a clean slate.

What followed was years of patient, methodical work — building audiences across platforms with deliberately different voices, opening a physical engagement hub in a former BHS unit in the Harvey Centre, and deploying an AI assistant modelled on Frederick Gibbard, the architect of Harlow's original New Town, to answer residents' questions about the one being planned around it.

This is also a conversation about what happens when a project is ready to move — and the process won't let it. Ten thousand homes in Gilston approved, then held by judicial review. A communications team with a story it wasn't yet permitted to tell.

Matt and Oliver talk about emotional investment, the death of local journalism, the discipline of a five-council partnership, and why the people who push back hardest are often the ones who care most about where they live.

The walk ends, as it began, in football.

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.

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.

In this episode of Legacy in Practice, Oliver Deed is joined by Eugene Prinsloo, Development Director at Community Health Partnerships, to reflect on a project where early engagement was tested by organised opposition.

Recorded on location, the conversation moves from the foundations of stakeholder mapping and relationship-building to the realities of navigating community resistance. Together, they explore how structured engagement, sequencing conversations correctly, and maintaining discipline under pressure can shift the tone of a project.

This is a candid discussion about conflict, trust, and what it actually takes to move from objection to progress, without compromising integrity.

A practical case study in engagement under scrutiny.

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.