While big schemes like Cambridge East grab the headlines, some of the most interesting building work in the city is happening on a much smaller scale, tucked into streets you would walk past without noticing.
Cambridge Investment Partnership, a joint venture between Cambridge City Council and The Hill Group, has spent the last few years quietly reshaping several neighbourhoods through infill projects. In Romsey, a former council depot has been turned into 118 new council homes and 118 homes for sale, with almost a third of the site given over to green open space, a park and a play area. In Arbury, an old community centre and a small block of flats have made way for 28 new council homes, a shop and a fresh community café.
Similar projects have appeared in King’s Hedges, where 75 new council homes replaced 35 ageing post war flats, and in Cherry Hinton, where two neighbouring sites containing 36 old council homes have been redeveloped into 115 new ones, along with a nursery and community room. Looking ahead, a scheme in East Barnwell is set to deliver 120 new council homes alongside a community centre, nursery and library.
What makes these projects different from a large greenfield development is the site itself. Building on a former depot, a cramped street corner or a tight urban plot brings its own challenges. There is often limited room for lorries to manoeuvre, less space to store materials and a real need to avoid waste or mess on narrow residential roads.
This is exactly the kind of environment where volumetric concrete delivery earns its keep. Rather than arriving with a fixed, pre-mixed load, a volumetric lorry mixes concrete fresh on site in the exact quantity needed. Firms such as Cardinalis Concrete, based in nearby Longstanton, have built their service around this approach, supplying builders working on infill and small scale sites across Cambridgeshire.
For a contractor squeezed onto a narrow Arbury side street or working around existing buildings in Cherry Hinton, ordering the wrong amount of concrete is a genuine problem. Too little means a delay while more is brought in. Too much means paying to have leftover concrete taken away. A volumetric mixer, of the sort found through Cardinalis Concrete’s website, removes much of that guesswork by measuring out materials on the spot.
These smaller developments rarely make the news in the way a 10,000 home scheme does, yet together they are adding hundreds of homes to Cambridge and changing the character of streets that have looked the same for decades. As councils across the city continue to search for infill sites, the demand for flexible, reliable concrete suppliers able to work on tight urban plots is likely to keep growing.
It is a reminder that Cambridge’s building boom is not just happening on its outskirts. It is also happening street by street, in the gaps between the houses already there, with local firms like Cardinalis Concrete helping to fill them in.
