Voters on roads and housing in growing town

Buckinghamshire is preparing for its second set of elections for its unitary authority, with people living in the county able to elect 97 councillors on 1 May.

It is a county that has seen plenty of political change in the last few years, as it now has Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs, when previously is was solidly Conservative.

Its second-largest town Aylesbury has seen a number of housing and road developments this decade, including at Kingsbrook, where about 2,500 homes have been built in three distinct villages on the edge.

The BBC visited one of them, the Canal Quarter, to see what people make of the place.

Joao Si and Dora Simoes moved to Aylesbury from Luton seven months ago and are starting a family.

They said "everybody wants to move here because of the grammar school", but had also heard "great things about the primary and secondary school" on the Kingsbrook development.

• Who can I vote for in the May local elections?
• Local elections 2025: Who is standing in my area?

Mr Si said "things were very packed" in Luton, but now they have moved they felt "like they are in a city, but have fields around and it is very child-friendly".

However, the couple said they had to register with a GP in Tring in neighbouring Hertfordshire because their nearest surgery "had not included the estate in its catchment area". This news came to them despite there being "a GP surgery next to a supermarket in the village", Mr Si said.

He added that Aylesbury's roads were "not ideal", so the couple tended to commute to work in London early in the morning, as "travel between 08:00 and 09:00 or after 15:00... is a bit of a nightmare".

Sharon Anderson works in education, and regularly visits the gym on the estate and its coffee shop to catch up with friends.

She said the development was "beautiful" and "looks really clear and the people are really nice".

While some new estates lack facilities, Ms Anderson said the Canal Quarter was great it had a supermarket and bakery. However, when it came to travelling into the centre of Aylesbury, she was less happy, calling the roads "quite complicated" and the potholes "ghastly".

She said in the morning "you cannot get from point A to B" and that "there needed to be a lot more done about the roads" which she said can be "quite chaotic, particularly during rush times".

She added that the cost of parking in Aylesbury meant it was "more alluring to go to Stadium MK in Milton Keynes, where the shopping areas were free to park at".

• Buckinghamshire Council's Housing Infrastructure Fund will eventually facilitate over 10,000 new homes in the Vale of Aylesbury area
• That includes around 2,500 in Kingsbrook, but also 3,000 at Hampden Fields, 1,100 at Woodlands and the remainder built on large sites around Aylesbury
• It has also helped fund Kingsbrook's secondary and primary schools
• Aylesbury has an ambition to have a series of link roads going around the town and three new roads have already been built, as part of the housing developments and also to help ease congestion
• A link road around the south-east of Aylesbury is also being delivered by Buckinghamshire Council
• A Stoke Mandeville relief road, is being built as part of the HS2 rail scheme, and Taylor Wimpey is building a link road as part of the Hampden Fields scheme
• Buckinghamshire Council also has "aspirational" plans for link roads to the west and north of Aylesbury to provide "missing" links in the road network
• The government awarded the council £172m for these and other projects in 2020, which overall will cost at least £244m, with the rest of the money coming from HS2, the Department for Transport and the UK Power Networks
• Buckinghamshire Council covers the whole of the county, except Milton Keynes. Elections for the new unitary authority were first held in 2021, a year after it replaced the county and district council set-up. The Conservatives had a landslide - winning 113 out of 147 seats
• The number of seats at the council has been reduced to 97 and all are up for grabs

Fay Bird moved to Aylesbury more than 40 years ago, but said "it had completely changed and become a whole new world".

She now lives near Waddesdon in the north of the county, but visited the Kingsbrook estate once a week to look after her grandchildren.

She described it as "the kind of place she would consider moving to" when she has to retire, and had "watched the shops come and the Tesco and the coffee shops" being built there as well.

Although she was in favour of development in general, she added that "with all the new roads coming in on all the new estates" the traffic had been "in turmoil for such a long time".

She moved four years ago, but said she "still does not know which road to take to get into Aylesbury", so said she avoided it quite a lot so that she did not get "stuck in a traffic jam or a diversion".

Dez Kay lives on the nearby Bedgrove Estate and said he remembered driving and walking through Kingsbrook "when it was just fields" but called it "like a new town" and a "great addition".

He said the huge developments in Hampden Fields had "taken up a lot of what used to be farmland " which had added to levels of traffic on the Wendover Road out of the town.

He said: "We all know when you mention Aylesbury that you think of the road situation.

"Having lived here for many years, trying to drive from one side of town to another is dreadful."

Although several roads were being built to try to ease congestion, Mr Kay said those had been "spoken about for many years" but he hoped these new roads were "going to be enough".

He said parking charges in Aylesbury were "a bit of a wind up when you go out in the evening".

"If you are using the theatre or the cinema, parking charges are still there until eight or nine o'clock at night [yet there were] other towns where you do not have to do that," he said.

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