What kind of island do we want to hand on?
As Guernsey wrestles with mounting pressure for new housing, there’s a temptation to see the solution as a matter of space, stretching outward, nibbling away at our fields and green/brown spaces.
What if, instead of expanding outwards, we looked inwards? What if the future of Guernsey’s growth was not about sprawl, but about the thoughtful regeneration of what already exists, especially in St Peter Port?
As someone who works in planning and design on the island, I’ve come to believe that large-scale urban regeneration offers one of the most hopeful and sustainable ways forward.
Not regeneration as erasure, but as renewal. Done well, it could create homes, reknit communities, and preserve the very things we value most: our countryside, our character, and our sense of belonging.
The idea might sound bold, but it isn’t new. Our ancestors built the ‘New Town’ at Clifton in the 19th century, and after the Second World War, Britain responded to overcrowded, decaying cities with a programme of planned ‘New Towns’ – self-contained communities with housing, services, and green space designed together. Guernsey doesn’t need a New Town in the literal sense, but it can benefit from New Town thinking, and there may be no better place to apply it than within St Peter Port.
Instead of scattering development along lanes and on greenhouse sites, we could refocus attention on our urban core. The town already has much of what makes a place liveable: character, walkability, a mix of buildings and uses. With care and creativity, it could evolve, layering new housing, workspace, and green space into areas already well-connected. This isn’t about towers overshadowing cottages; it’s about compact, thoughtful intensification that draws on Guernsey’s unique visual language.
Because the truth is, sprawl is the lazy option. It fragments communities, eats into productive land, and locks us into car dependency. Every new house at the island’s edge stretches infrastructure further, increases congestion, and hollows out the vibrancy of the centre. Yet this is often seen as the path of least resistance, quietly spreading, rather than confronting the complexity of change within the town; it sometimes feels like it’s the only option we have.
Resisting sprawl doesn’t mean blocking development, it means doing development differently. St Peter Port still holds untapped potential: under-used commercial sites, redundant gardens, ageing properties with space for backland development or vertical growth. Some of these sites are in private hands, others held by institutions or the States itself. With imagination, they could become the foundation of a renewed urban fabric.
I’ve been exploring a model that combines mid-rise vertical housing with deep flexibility and community expression. The idea is to provide structure without monotony: a building designed not as a monolith, but as a vertical patchwork of individual homes, small gardens, and balconies. An approved design code would allow owner-occupiers to express their identity within a broader visual coherence, like the majority of Guernsey’s older neighbourhoods, where variety is a feature, not a flaw.This kind of development could provide a mix of tenures, encourage neighbourliness, and enable Guernsey’s next generation to live close to jobs, education, and each other. Crucially, it would allow us to protect what lies outside the town barriers by rethinking what lies within them.
Is this wishful thinking? I don’t believe so. Our current planning framework, while conservative with a small ‘c’, already contains the seeds of this kind of change. The Island Development Plan encourages regeneration in Main Centres. It promotes mixed-use development, compact growth, and sustainable transport. Policies such as GP11 allow for creative interpretation, especially when proposals come with strong design codes and public benefit.
Planners on the island have shown a willingness to consider bold ideas when they’re well thought through and sensitive to context. But someone has to go first. Someone has to demonstrate that regeneration in St Peter Port is not only possible, but preferable to the slow spread of suburbia. We don’t need to wait for new policy, we can use the tools we already have to make something extraordinary.
Of course, any change to the town will provoke concern, and rightly so. We must be vigilant in protecting heritage, light, views, and neighbourliness. But regeneration doesn’t have to mean wholesale destruction. It can mean layering, adding new chapters to the story of a place, while honouring the pages already written.
So here is an invitation: to see St Peter Port not as a relic to preserve in amber, nor as a problem to be avoided, but as a living town capable of evolving with care. To imagine homes for key workers, young families, and older residents in the heart of our community. To rediscover what compact, connected, characterful town life could look like in the 21st century.
This isn’t a finished plan, it’s a conversation starter. The future of Guernsey shouldn’t be shaped by default, but by design. And maybe, just maybe, that design begins not in the fields of the west or in pockets in the north, but in the courtyards, rooftops, and neglected corners of St Peter Port.
Oliver Brock
Oliver Brock is a Place-Maker living and working in Guernsey. He runs Corbeau, a community planning venture, and is active in the community as a volunteer in the areas of youth development, heritage conservation and local government.