St Philip’s Marsh is about to become the new place in Bristol to live, work and study. The draft Masterplan, created by the Bristol Temple Quarter Partnership is now out for consultation. It proposes at least 7,000 homes — for roughly 15,000 people — on 94 hectares of old industrial land east of Temple Meads, plus workspace for thousands of jobs and student housing beside the university’s new campus. For an area with almost no publicly accessible green space currently, the Masterplan’s vision of parks, green streets and riverside walks is most welcome, and we want it to succeed.
However, when we measured the plan’s own drawings — every park, square and green corridor, checked against the Council’s own GIS records — the numbers put forward started to wobble.
A table that vanished
The Masterplan’s headline is 22.4 hectares of open space and green corridors, including 8.1 hectares of ‘new open space’. Curiously, the published figure that should show this breakdown contains no numbers at all. The arithmetic survives only in the figure’s hidden accessibility text — the description read aloud by screen readers. This refers to a quantification table ‘overlaid on the side of the plan’. However, this table was removed before publication, and nobody has updated the hidden text. Our own measurements confirm the totals are correctly computed. So why take the table out?
How big is Sparke Evans Park? Pick a number
The document gives three different sizes for the area’s only existing park, Sparke Evans Park: 2.9 hectares in the body text, 2.5 in the hidden arithmetic, and 2.34 as drawn. The Council’s own GIS records 2.3416 ha. A small thing, perhaps — but the body text overstates the park by 24%, which is the baseline everything else is measured from.
A bigger question is how large is the site itself? The Masterplan never says. Its drawn boundary encloses 94 hectares but the council’s investment website says St Philip’s Marsh totals 65 hectares. Nobody reconciles the two. This is important as the site area is the denominator for the plan’s flagship promise of 25% tree canopy. 25% of which number?
What actually counts as a park?
Bristol’s Parks and Green Spaces Strategy is clear that ‘public realm’ — squares, promenades, landscaped frontages — does not count as open space for recreation. Strip those out of the Masterplan’s 8.1 hectares and the qualifying provision shrinks to somewhere between 5 and 6.6 hectares, most generously counted — and only around 2.6 to 4.3 hectares of it is new. The real new parks are two: Chapel Park (1.26 ha) and Fruit Market Park (about 1.3–1.5 ha). Each is roughly the size of College Green. Between them and Sparke Evans Park, they are expected to host school play, neighbourhood events, ecology, gardens and the daily recreation of thousands.
The density arithmetic nobody has published
Bristol’s adopted standard for the city centre zone is 7.75 m² of recreational open space per person — itself barely a quarter of the 33 m² the average Bristolian enjoys citywide. Working through the strategy’s published figures shows that standard has been set with zero headroom: it assumes the central area’s population will rise 65%, offset by just 2.9 hectares of new green space, landing exactly on the 7.75 m² standard adopted.
The St Philip’s Marsh residents will get roughly 3.3 to 4.4 m² of qualifying green space per person on site, about one tenth of the citywide average. And that’s before you include the daytime population, who will share the same spaces: a workforce of 5,000 or more, several thousand students, and those whom the plan rightly invites in, living nearby in The Dings, Barton Hill, Totterdown and Redcliffe — some of the most green-space-deprived communities in Bristol. If the Masterplan’s population exceeds what the strategy assumed — and its unpublished assumptions are a question we’ve put to the Council — the adopted standard is breached simply by the arithmetic.
Five-minute-walk — from the front door, or the tenth floor?
We modelled walk times over the plan’s own street network. The average journey to the nearest named park is about three minutes. This supports the five-minute-walk promise. However, with roughly one in five residents living above the fifth floor in residential towers of ten storeys and more, this will add to the walk time just getting to the ground before setting off. For those households the five-minute promise quickly becomes longer. Sparke Evans Park, in the south-east of the site, is up to 21 minutes from the far north-west corner, while parts of the employment area are 7–10 minutes from any named park.
And five minutes for whom? The plan’s promise assumes a brisk walker covering 400 metres in five minutes. Bristol’s own parks standard describes that same 400 metres as a nine-minute walk — the pace of older people, small children, anyone with a buggy or those whose walking is impaired: exactly the people who parks matter most for. At that pace, every estimate above roughly doubles, and the far corner of the site is nearly 40 minutes from Sparke Evans Park. The five-minute-walk promise is really a 400-metre promise — which should be judged at the speed of the slowest, not the fastest.
Three thousand trees, ready by the 2050s?
The 25% canopy pledge needs 16–19 hectares of new tree canopy: in the order of 3,000 trees. These will largely be planted on streets that must also fit cycleways, drainage and utilities — creating a near-continuous tree ceiling over two-thirds of the public realm. Newly planted trees would deliver under 1% of site canopy on day one and take 25–40 years to mature, on top of the 20 years needed to complete the development. The 25% canopy pledge currently has no target date, no baseline and no monitoring. So for the first couple of decades, a resident on, say, the tenth floor will look down on saplings, not canopy — exactly what the international 3/30/300 benchmark (3 visible trees, 30% canopy, green space within 300 m) aims to prevent.
What we’re asking for
Our submission makes a series of specific requests, including:
- Correct the ambiguous reported park sizes.
- Reinstate the vanished quantification table.
- State the definitive site area and publish the boundary as open GIS data.
- Publish a schedule of open space that distinguishes real recreational space from public realm space, and test this against the projected full daytime population.
- Publish the population assumptions behind the quantity standard.
- Put a date, baseline, funding and monitoring regime on the canopy pledge.
- Front-load tree planting.
- Adopt 3/30/300 at design-code stage.
- Explain how and when the riverside open spaces will be delivered, given their dependency on the Avon Riversides 2100 flood defence programme — for which £88m has been identified against a further £128m still required.
None of this requires redrawing the plan. It just requires the Partnership to show its workings — because on green space, the difference between a promise and a number is where communities lose out, one planning application at a time.
One last thing. This document was meant to be a Supplementary Planning Document — statutory guidance sitting alongside the Local Plan. A change in Government regulations earlier this year means it will now be adopted only as an “endorsed Masterplan”: non-statutory guidance that developers must merely “have regard to”. That makes everything above more fragile, which is why our submission also asks for the green space framework to be secured through Local Plan policy wording, where it will have legal force.
The consultation closes on 28 July 2026. You can respond through the council’s survey or by emailing: hello@bristoltemplequarter.com — and if green space in this new piece of Bristol matters to you, please do.
Read our submission, with methods and maps, here:
SPM Masterplan Consultation – BTF Response
Analysis for this submission included independent measurement of the Masterplan’s Figure 07.34, georeferenced against Bristol City Council GIS data, and walk-time modelling over the illustrative street network, carried out with AI assistance (Claude, Anthropic) under our direction. Methods are set out in full in the submission’s annex.
Bristol Tree Forum 