Bid to build eco-retirement village

Plans have been submitted to build the UK’s first eco-retirement village in the Yorkshire mill town of Heckmondwike near Huddersfield.

Ponderosa Park will comprise 180 homes built to levels 5 and 6 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, featuring ‘living walls and garden roofs’.

Complete with a 40-bed care home and 44 affordable starter homes, and located on the site of an old quarry and sewage works, the development will be self-sustaining with energy provided by biomass boilers burning woodchips from fast growing willow trees landscaping the estate.

While meeting an urgent demand for nursing and residential care for the elderly in a deprived area of Yorkshire, the Ponderosa development is set to regenerate the local economy by using locally sourced materials; providing 300 jobs in construction including up to 200 apprenticeship placements; and creating more than 50 full time and part time jobs to maintain the retirement village and care home once complete.

The man with the vision behind the proposal, local landowner philanthropist Howard Cook, is working with Kirklees Council planners so the development can meet the rising demand for retirement homes.

Cook, who was awarded the MBE for providing work for the disabled by setting up Ponderosa Park visitor centre for rare-breed animals, said: “Because we own the land, we were asked by Kirklees Council to regenerate Heckmondwike. It is only because we own the land that we have been able to fund a retirement village with all the green features that make this development so unique.”