The new commuter town being built a 30-minute train ride from London

When it is built, this brand new town will be just a 30-minute train ride from London and within commuting distance of Oxford and Cambridge too. With up to 40,000 new homes, a new station, a new hospital, a buzzing town centre of shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs and a new country park, the ambitious new project is backed by government-appointed task force and is part of the broader Oxford to Cambridge Corridor.

Stretching southwards from the edges of St Neots in Cambridgeshire to the northern edges of Sandy in Bedfordshire, it is anticipated the building and sustaining of the new town will create upward of 30,000 new jobs.

The proposed new train station on the East Coast Main Line and East West Rail is expected to provide train journey times to London of under one hour. It is also projected to offer connections to Cambridge in under 30 minutes and final planning issues and additional funding are expected to be ironed out in 2026 ready for building to begin.

The proposed Tempsford New Town in Bedfordshire is envisioned as a major, sustainable settlement featuring up to 40,000 homes. This "market town" will focus on eco-friendly, integrated living.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed building Tempsford station in Bedfordshire, which would offer connections to the East Coast Main Line and East West Rail, as part of a move to make "Europe's Silicon Valley" between Oxford and Cambridge.

However not everyone is happy. Before Reeves announced plans to accelerate a “growth arc” between Oxford and Cambridge, the tiny village of Tempsford as it is today was not particularly well known. 

Tempsford, though, has an impressive history for such a small place. It is where Boudicca rallied against the Romans and where the early English kings fought off the Danes and where Winston Churchill launched secret flights to aid resistance fighters keeping the Nazis at bay.

The new town, designed for up to 350,000 people, faces significant development pressure and local opposition. Parish council chairman David Sutton said residents were worried their village of about 600 inhabitants could be swallowed up.

Mr Sutton, who is also a landlord at The Wheatsheaf village pub, said people were "not against all development, but don't want the village to turn into a city".

He said: "I actually think more people are coming round to development, but it is just about the scale of it. We don't want tens of thousands of homes and no infrastructure.

"It's a very small rural community - they've either farmed here for generations or they've moved specifically to a rural community, they don't want to live in a big city."

He added there were also concerns about noise from the trains and the impact of housebuilding, given Tempsford's "worse and worse" annual winter flooding.

East West Rail said the new interchange station in Tempsford, between Sandy and St Neots in Cambridgeshire, was now due to be "delivered up to five years earlier than planned", but no specific date was mentioned.

In 2026, key activities around the project will focus on strategic environmental assessments, infrastructure planning, and addressing funding gaps with the government aiming for development to start by 2029.