A leafy garden village in rural Biggleswade in Bedfordshire: it’s not the kind of development you’d expect Jackie Sadek to be delivering.

Sadek is known for her work with grittier urban environments such as South Kilburn and the Thames Gateway, as well as for advising government ministers on the realities of large-scale urban transformation and telling various hometruths about regeneration.

But in Biggleswade, Sadek is still putting the skills she honed through a career in urban regeneration to good use. The business she founded, UK Regeneration, is setting out not only to deliver an urban extension of four new village neighbourhoods with up to 7,000 homes, but also to improve Biggleswade’s town centre in an approach that is attempting to break down some of the “them and us” conflicts of UK housebuilding and promote a more inclusive model. With the medieval market town of Biggleswade sitting at the centre of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, a key area for housing growth, the company has a high-profile location for its debut development.

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