Newland Park is a unique mixed residential community, with exemplar sustainability and low carbon credentials, designed to maximise a redundant university campus while conserving and enhancing the 73 ha of parkland that provides a setting to the Georgian Grade II listed mansion and its formal gardens, designed by the eminent Landscape Architect, Thomas Mawson.

A comprehensive landscape appraisal and characterisation study of the site has informed the strategic landscape masterplan that will co-ordinate and realise the concept of 'living in a park'. The principal design aim seeks to accommodate 326 units with minimal landscape and visual impact and to reinstate and restore the historic parkland to its former condition.

For example, the design of the parkland housing has been evolved in response to the listed building and allows the parkland setting either side of the main tree lined avenue to be reinstated, and thus enable the Georgian mansion to once again become the focus of the space. Further drivers for the design are the moulding of the site topography to reduce visual impact and the typology of an estate wall. The wall forms the rear elevation of the units to front the parkland and provides an undulating vertical axis that responds to the changing topography in the manner of an estate wall. The new dwellings are proposed to be placed behind this wall, set-back to be visually recessive and to allow views over the reinstated parkland, thus providing the imagery of buildings behind an estate wall rather than of houses intruding into the parkland.