Highways design guide

Over the coming years, there are excellent opportunities for Telford residents, businesses and visitors to benefit from significant levels of investment planned in key projects across the Borough. Partners across Telford are working together to maximise these benefits and to enhance and promote the Borough as a great place for business innovation and enterprise with a world-class environment, landscape and quality of life on offer. 

Telford and Wrekin Council are committed to playing a key role in delivering the best possible services for the people of Telford. As a Highways Authority and with its other responsibilities the Council, alongside the planning authority, developers, landowners, and other partners, play a key role in the delivery of infrastructure and services to support communities.

As new housing and commercial sites are developed across the Borough, the aim of this guide is to ensure the design of new roads meet the needs of future residents, visitors and users, whilst retaining the local distinctiveness of the area. The highway network serving new residential and commercial developments in Telford should strive for excellence in design quality, be beneficial to all and improve the quality of life for all those that have an interaction within the Borough.

Well designed developments add economic, environmental, social and cultural value and helps communities flourish. This guide will help everyone involved in new developments to achieve good design and supports an effective and efficient planning application process.

The purpose of this guide

This guide is for:

• developers
• landowners and property managers
• architects
• engineers
• surveyors and designers
• local planning authority
• all others involved in the design and construction of new residential and commercial developments.

It provides advice and guidance on the design elements that combine to create successful residential and commercial developments in Telford and Wrekin. It is not intended to give definitive or prescriptive design advice and is for guidance purposes only.

This will be determined by:

• safe movement for all within the development
• improvement in quality of life
• maintainable built environments
• integration with and enhancement of the existing community
• low traffic speeds.

This new guide is to be used in partnership with Manual for Streets, Manual for Streets 2, Design Manual for Road and Bridges and The Specification for Highway Works. It is designed to be less prescriptive than traditional design guides and places greater emphasis on the development of low maintenance, innovative proposals by using new ways of thinking and different methods of approaching both design and construction.

Telford has seen some of the largest housing estate and commercial development in the UK. As a result, many lessons have been learnt in terms of what has been successful when delivering new development. The guide looks to build on these lessons to help ensure that new development designs and delivery terms are right first time in order to negate the additional time and cost implications of redesigns and possible abortive construction works.

This guide is very much a live document that will be open to revision and further development as new working methods, technologies and wider highway, and planning guidance change. However, the core principles for the development vision shall remain unchanged.

We look forward to working with you.

View the highways design guide

Last updated: 06/04/2022 17:04