Landsec U+I

With a significant project such as this, we created a strategic plan to ensure we spoke to all the right people at the right time, building in feedback, advice and insight into each subsequent phase of the research. 

This included: 

• Engaging internal stakeholders throughout the process (Anglian Water, Cambridge City Council, U+I and TOWN, among others). 

• Ensuring an inclusive approach, engaging with a wide range of community representatives, including hard-to-reach audiences. 

• Being future/next generation-focused, given that the completion of this project is many years away. 

• Ensuring that name suggestions are appropriate and fit for use. 

• Creating an exemplary approach for community engagement in urban regeneration. 

The audience insight gained also needed to fulfill essential points for the development’s strategy, including the strength of fit with the promises and values of the development, being easy to remember and pronounce, ownable and identifiable with Cambridge, and that it works with the surrounding place names. 

As a starting point, the naming project team consisted of representatives of the landowners, strategic development team, City Council and Mobas – selected as an established naming and brand creation specialist with a presence in, and understanding of, Cambridge and surrounding communities. 

The democratic process involved the active participation of hundreds of local people. It included extensive local research, a collaborative project with Cambridge Regional College to identify and research possible project names, workshops with local stakeholder groups, to understand what local people would like to see in a project name, and a month-long public vote that offered the community the opportunity to decide between a shortlist of options. 

Mobas’ unique audience-fuelled approach ensured that key groups were able to contribute directly to the process, in particular: 

• The next generation of Cambridge residents and workers, through the involvement of students at the nearby Cambridge Regional College. 

• Local lay people, through co-creation workshops. 

• Local community representatives, through co-creation workshops. 

• Key stakeholders in e.g. Anglian Water and Cambridge City Council through one-to-one interviews. 

• Interested local representatives, through the Ideas Exchange group. 

• Niche Cambridge audiences (e.g. traveller community) through discrete outreach by the project team.

• All Cambridge residents, through an online poll. 

Through our long-term, audience fuelled, research-led process,  the new name for the project was selected: Hartree.  

The chosen name pays tribute to Eva Hartree, (1873-1947), an inspiring woman who was the first female mayor of Cambridge and a trailblazing champion of gender equality and women’s rights. 

Eva Hartree’s notable work as the Hon Secretary of Cambridge Women’s Housing Association, dedicated to providing housing for professional women, adds further significance to the name selection. 

By honouring Eva Hartree, a trailblazing individual in the city's history, her legacy is preserved, and also highlights the importance of community involvement in shaping the future of such neighbourhoods. 

It also fulfils the wishes of community representatives that the groundbreaking new site be named after a woman, with genuine local connections, but not someone representing the University – as so many key Cambridge landmarks are named for academics and the wish was for a representative of ‘the people’. 

Engaging with the community has been at the heart of designing, building and developing Hartree, so being able to name the project after such a renowned individual in collaboration with local people has helped to shape the ongoing project.