Mayor signs off another £1.5m to unlock Mansfield and Harworth housing developments
Two housing developments in Mansfield and Harworth are to be unlocked courtesy of new funding from the East Midlands Mayor.
Claire Ward (Lab) has signed off on more than £1.5m to unlock the developments through her Brownfield Housing Fund (BHF).
Harworth Estates Ltd had applied for the cash to help them build Thoresby Vale in Edwinstowe and Simpson Park near Harworth and Bircotes.
The Edwinstowe site takes the majority of the cash, with £1.165m being provided to allow 60 one, two, three and four-bed homes to be built across 3.9 acres of disused land.
Of those, 40 properties will be affordable – owned by councils or housing associations for provision to people who can’t afford homes on the standard market – while 20 will be for private sale.
The 20 private homes will all be three-bedroom properties, while the affordable homes will be a mix of all of the available types.
Cumulatively, Thoresby Vale, which is being built on the site of the old Thoresby Colliery, is a nearly 1,000-home new estate and village comprising a school, green space, infrastructure and a village centre.
The number of homes and amount of money applied for by the Harworth Group has been reduced from £1.8m for 70 homes when interest was first declared, to £1.6m for 64 homes and now £1.2m.
Planning permission for the estate has been given in stages due to its size, with 800 homes originally allowed for but another 190 approved by Newark & Sherwood Council at the end of 2025.
The developers had said that without the BHF money, the building of the 60 homes applied for would not be able to take place.
Simpson Park, on the other hand, is also a development of around 1,000 new homes, on the outskirts of the towns of Harworth and Bircotes.
The site is also a former colliery, which was demolished in 2013.
The developer had only requested £391,715 for this site, to help support just 14 of the 1,000 properties, and the East Midlands Combined Authority (EMCCA) assessed the application as viable.
The 14 properties are all one and two-bed bungalows.
The BHF, announced in 2024 by the East Midlands Combined County Authority, is a pot of money that was provided to the mayor by the government, to give out to developers wanting to build on land that has had development on in the past but is now abandoned, derelict or unused.
The pot exists because building on brownfield land – as opposed to untouched green land in the countryside – usually comes with complications such as the need to rectify environmental issues with the ground, demolish existing buildings or identify hazards.
Elsewhere this year, the mayor has signed off BHF money for a number of developments across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, including £7.2m for a large apartment block just outside Nottingham city centre.