Berwick Town Council is soliciting residents' views on the Berwick-upon-Tweed Neighbourhood Plan: a guide to decision-making in Berwick, Tweedmouth and Spittal that should be used by the County Council when making decisions on planning applications.
The consultation was announced on the 7th April, and the deadline for responses is 30 April 2026 - you do not have long to have your say. But it's important that the public make their opinions known about how their environment is shaped, especially since the plan will be valid until 2040! It is also crucial that the neighbourhood plan has 'teeth' and incorporates design codes to protect the unique, historic beauty of our town. We elaborate on this below in A design code for Berwick.
Once the neighbourhood plan is completed, a referendum will be held to approve it.
Please read BTC's consultation document, and optionally read our annotated guide below. If you wish, you can use our own tool below to fill out the questionnaire with further explanations compared with the official questionnaire.
You can contact the council (contact email on the BTC page) and if you wish to contact us, you can email us on info@berwick-heritage.co.uk.
These tools are completely unofficial and unsanctioned, but we hope they will nevertheless be useful.
We have tried to clarify the consultation document, from a heritage perspective. Click below to view our annotated and condensed guide, showing the key points with explanations.
Annotated Guide: HTML | 6-page printable PDF
Click below to show our assisted questionnaire. This gives clarification of the questions, by summarising relevant portions of the consultation document rather than just referencing it, and also includes sample answers that you can edit or replace. When it's complete, you will have various options for sending the results of the questionnaire to Berwick Town Council: pasting your answers into the official form, sending your answers by email, or printing your answers out. It won't automatically send anything, so feel free to try out this form, which will save your answers between sessions.
Please note that the suggested answers in this tool are biased by our belief that heritage is of crucial importance to our town. Your mileage might vary!
Berwick is beautiful. Berwick is unique. And right now, Berwick needs a design code.
Our town is one of the most remarkable in England: a walled Elizabethan garrison town with over 300 listed buildings, ancient ramparts that have stood for nearly five centuries, and a skyline that has drawn artists and visitors for generations. You don't have to be an architectural historian to feel it. You feel it the moment you walk through the Scotsgate, stand on the Old Bridge, or look down Marygate on a winter morning.
But feeling it isn't enough to protect it. What protects it is policy.
Right now, Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council is preparing a Neighbourhood Plan, a legal document that will shape what gets built in our town for years to come. This is not a routine bureaucratic exercise. It is one of the most significant opportunities our community has had to put real, enforceable rules in place about how new development should look and feel. Rules with teeth, not aspirations that developers can set aside, but specific standards that planners will be legally required to follow.
What Berwick needs is a design code and a pattern book.
Design codes and pattern books are powerful tools for protecting and continuing a town's architectural character. Rather than vague aspirations about "sympathetic design" or "respecting local character", phrases that sound reassuring but carry no legal weight, a design code sets out enforceable, specific standards: the materials permitted, the proportions of windows and doors, roofline treatments, street layouts, and the relationship between buildings and the public realm. A pattern book goes further, providing illustrated house types that embody these principles so that developers, planners and residents share a common, unambiguous picture of what good development looks like.
Chesham in Buckinghamshire recently adopted exactly this approach, commissioning Create Streets to produce a design code rooted in the town's historic character; their neighbourhood plan passed with 89% of the referendum vote. From Create Streets:
“Our design work was underpinned by extensive co-design and consultation as we wanted to ensure that the proposals had both local popular support and were rooted in the unique character and history of Chesham. We ‘engaged wide’ through online surveys using our Create Communities mapping platform and ‘engaged deep’ in the form of one-to-one interviews, stalls at local community events, and design workshops. The online survey received 2,822 individual comments, providing a clear steer on local architectural preferences.
In total, we developed outline masterplans for 17 sites across the town with the potential to deliver up to 900 homes. The designs are underpinned by the Neighbourhood Design Code which includes a pattern book of house types, from small mews through to warehouse style flats, as well as details on everything from paving to planting and bins to bricks. Our masterplans and house types follow a simple plot-based approach, with standardised plot widths, allowing the designs to easily be applied to any new site in Chesham.”
Strict, enforced codes produce places people genuinely love. Berwick, with its extraordinary concentration of listed buildings, Georgian streetscapes and Elizabethan ramparts, deserves nothing less. A design code for Berwick, grounded in its specific vernacular, developed with its residents, and with real teeth in the planning system, is the tool that turns good intentions into lasting protection.
Without those rules, nothing stops the next Pets at Home or unsympathetic glass boxes on Spittal Beach. There are buildings that, whatever their practical merits, many of us feel have done real damage to the character of the town we love. The planning system, left to its own devices, does not automatically protect places like Berwick. That is why your response to this consultation matters.
Planning consultations are often dismissed as the preserve of professionals and committed campaigners. They don't have to be. The neighbourhood plan will eventually go to a community referendum but by the time residents vote, most of the key decisions will already have been made. The moment to influence what goes into the plan is now, while the scoping stage is still open.
Berwick's character was built up over centuries. Its future is being decided this month. Please have your say.