Creating healthy communities
Creating communities where it’s easy to be healthy
Health has been a key success for Bicester Garden Town due to the close relationship between the urban planning project and Cherwell’s healthy place shaping programme.
Bicester was named a Healthy New Town in 2016, bringing with it funding from the NHS, using the town’s proposed growth to tackle levels of obesity and social isolation. The project ran in parallel with Garden Town work, with officers sharing time between both projects. This fast tracked the development of wellbeing initiatives across the whole town, bringing benefits to existing as well as future residents.
Despite NHS funding ceasing in 2019, we have continued to financially support the Healthy Bicester partnership and programmes of work to make healthy choices simple and easy for all, developing a district wide healthy place shaping programme which is being delivered across Cherwell and shared with partners throughout Oxfordshire.
The first three years of the project have been fully evaluated. For more information, here's a link to the report, comparing the residents' survey results from 2017 and 2019.