School Close, Bampton
Eighteen zero operational carbon homes, delivered turnkey for Mid Devon District Council
School Close replaces ten outdated council properties in the heart of Bampton with eighteen modern, energy-efficient homes, built using ZED PODS’ BOPAS-accredited offsite volumetric system. Delivered as a full turnkey Design & Build commission, the scheme pairs zero-operational-carbon performance and very low running costs with the speed and certainty of modern methods of construction — helping the Council meet local housing need, cut long-term costs, and keep local households in the community they already call home.
Project information
Location: 1-4a, 19-28 School Close, Bampton, EX16 9NN
Scope of works: Full Turnkey Service — Design & Build
Type of construction: Offsite volumetric modern methods of construction (MMC)
Building Solution: Permanent
Status: Construction complete
Project team
Principal Designer & Contractor
Client
Funding support
Homes England and One Public Estate
Before: 10 outdated council properties
Project at a glance
Site area: 4,682 m²
Homes delivered: 18
Total GIFA: 1,376 m²
Volumetric modules installed: 48, across four phases
EPC rating: A, all 18 homes
Solar PV Panels: 208
Renewable electricity generated: 80,627 kWh per year
Annual carbon saving: 18.9 tCO₂/yr
Air source heat pumps: 18 (one per home)
Social value ratio: £4.80 returned per £1 invested
Parking spaces: 38
The brief
Turning a tired council site into affordable, energy-positive homes.
Mid Devon District Council set out to increase the supply of well-designed, genuinely affordable homes for local people — and to do it on land it already owned. The existing ten properties at School Close were in poor condition and no longer matched the needs of the district’s waiting list.
The project was made possible through the Affordable Homes Programme 2021–2026, the Government’s £11.5 billion capital funding package supporting the delivery of around 162,000 new affordable homes. The Council also secured funding from the Brownfield Land Release Fund, part of a £660k award to build 50 social-rented homes across six regeneration sites in the district.
ZED PODS was appointed to take the site from a blank sheet to completed homes: feasibility, design, planning, offsite manufacture, groundworks, installation and handover, under a single point of responsibility.
Site and planning considerations
Designed beyond policy, not just to it.
A tight village site bordered by a conservation area, an existing retaining wall and mature woodland set clear constraints on layout, height and access. Rather than treat local policy as a checklist, the design team used it as a floor and pushed past it where it improved daily life for residents:
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Parking and EV — 38 spaces provided, exceeding the Council’s 1.7-per-dwelling requirement, with EV charging provision developed to at least one accessible charging point per ten homes. Any surplus parking is made available for local community use.
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Cycle storage — accommodated within individual plots, meeting the two-per-dwelling standard for 1–2 bed homes and four per dwelling for larger family homes.
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Accessibility — the scheme meets the requirement for 20% of homes to comply with Part M4(2) of the Building Regulations.
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Refuse and recycling — dedicated storage sized to Mid Devon’s SPD for terraced housing, integrated into the plot design rather than added afterwards.
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Fire tender access — the layout maintains pumping appliance access within 45 m of every point of every dwelling.
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Open space — communal green space, community gardens, a play area and an extended footpath connect the scheme into Bampton’s existing green network.
Design approach and massing
A terraced form rooted in Bampton’s character.
School Close is design-led, practical and grounded in its local context. The massing is organised primarily as terraced housing — an efficient typology that accommodates a varied dwelling mix while creating a cohesive neighbourhood character. Terraces also perform well: shared party walls reduce heat loss and improve thermal efficiency. Every home has a generous private rear garden, prioritising liveability and day-to-day wellbeing.
The layout was refined repeatedly to respond to site constraints and improve amenity. The southernmost terraces step back from the telegraph poles, the conservation area edge and the existing retaining wall, while turning to give south-facing gardens and maximise daylight. Communal landscaping was redesigned to be genuinely usable, with clearer routes, shared green space and places for neighbours to meet informally. Throughout, practical access and parking are balanced against a calm residential character supported by planting, community gardens and connecting paths.
Public consultation
A scheme shaped through pre-application engagement and local communities.
A mailing went out in November 2022 explaining the aims of the scheme and showing the general massing. ZED PODS and Mid Devon District Council reached every resident within a 100-metre radius, inviting feedback on the outline massing and landscape design via a distributed newsletter.
The consultation event followed on 9 December 2022 — deliberately timed for the point at which the team was confident the technical issues were resolvable, so that what the community saw was a fair representation of the scheme that would ultimately be submitted. Attended by ZED PODS and representatives of the Council’s housing team, the session was able to answer both architectural and planning policy questions. Four themes emerged:
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Questions about Mid Devon’s housing replacement and tenant moving policies.
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Concern about retaining access to rear gardens.
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Support for the principle of redeveloping the area.
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Concern about local population growth and GP capacity.
The Council confirmed that residents of the existing properties had a choice: move to a new social-rent council home in the local area, or wait to be rehoused within the new development. ZED PODS confirmed that existing access to rear gardens would be retained. While there were questions about the process, there was clear support for replacing homes widely agreed to be in very poor condition.
Full turnkey delivery
One team, one point of responsibility, RIBA Stages 0–7
School Close was delivered as a full turnkey Design & Build commission covering every stage: design to RIBA standards, the planning application, offsite manufacture, module delivery, on-site groundworks and construction, and handover. A single point of responsibility removed the interfaces where cost and programme risk normally accumulate.
The scheme maximises the Council’s housing and parking provision on the site, delivering 18 energy-efficient homes: 10 × 1B2P, 2 × 2B3P, 2 × 3B6P and 4 × 4B8P, each with generous private amenity space. Landscaping extends beyond the plots themselves: communal gardens and an extended footpath improve access to the surrounding green space, and Bampton gains additional parking, communal green and a better-connected landscape.
MMC and delivery quality
Factory precision, on-site speed
School Close reflects Mid Devon’s wider commitment to MMC-led delivery of sustainable housing. By combining coordinated design with offsite-led processes, ZED PODS ran foundation and site works in parallel with modular manufacture at our offsite factory in Peterborough — improving quality control, reducing waste and shortening the on-site programme.
Forty-eight volumetric modules were built, fitted out and quality-checked in factory conditions, then delivered and installed across four short phases. Each installation phase took four days or less, keeping disruption to Bampton residents to a minimum and getting the buildings weathertight far faster than traditional construction would allow.
Building safety was designed in from the outset. Each home has its own independent structure with no structural bridging elements, supporting robust party wall performance and 60-minute fire ratings.
As-built performance
Independently tested after completion, not just modelled before it.
Every home at School Close was tested and certified once built. All eighteen passed on every measure.
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Energy rating: A on all 18 homes. Every dwelling scored between 99 and 104 on the EPC scale. Several homes scored above 100 — the point at which a home generates more energy than it uses.
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Airtightness: 1.35 to 2.05 m³/h/m², against a target of 3. Airtightness measures how much warm air escapes through gaps in the building fabric. Every home beat the design target, and the best performed at less than half the permitted leakage, meaning fewer draughts, less wasted heat and lower bills.
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Overheating: all 18 homes pass Part O. Independent TM59 dynamic modelling simulated a full year of south-west weather to confirm the homes stay comfortable through hot summers, an increasingly important test as UK summers warm.
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Fabric performance: U-values measure how quickly heat escapes through a building element — lower is better. Every part of the building envelope at School Close outperforms the maximum permitted under Part L, with walls 42% better and party walls eliminating heat transfer between homes entirely.
Social Value
£4.80 of social value for every £1 invested
An independent benefits appraisal assessed what School Close returns to the public purse and the wider community over its lifetime. Against £6.9m of development costs, the scheme delivers £33.2m in discounted benefits — a benefit/cost ratio of 4.80, and a net present social value of £26.2m. The investment pays for itself by 2028.
Nearly nine-tenths of that value is societal rather than cash-releasing: better health outcomes, reduced pressure on public services, lower energy costs for residents, and the stability that secure, warm housing brings to people’s lives.
Alongside the monetised benefits, the appraisal recognises improvements the model cannot price — climate resilience, reduced anti-social behaviour and stronger community cohesion, more efficient use of brownfield land, and low-carbon living training for residents.
Outcomes
What School Close delivers for Bampton
Eighteen zero-operational-carbon homes now stand where ten failing council properties once did — an 80% uplift in homes on the same council-owned land, with no net loss of amenity. The mix supports single residents and couples while creating room for families to stay in Bampton, close to schools, services and the networks they already rely on.
For the Council, the scheme demonstrates a repeatable route to high-quality affordable housing: council-owned land, grant funding, integrated design and MMC delivery, with the running costs of the finished homes low enough to matter to the households living in them.
