O’Donnell Brown has submitted plans for six new carbon-neutral homes that would form the UK’s first Passivhaus Plus-certified hamlet. This is a new certification intended to recognise the production of onsite renewable energy by passively designed building, which in this case includes south-facing photovoltaic panels. The scheme is in West Tofts, a village in the Thetford Forest area of Norfolk that was requisitioned for wartime military training. Many residents never returned and the area – in what is now being dubbed the Cambridge-Norwich Tech Corridor – still shows signs of the trauma, with several disused and dilapidated buildings. The proposals have been commissioned by a family whose parents used to live on the 0.51ha site opposite the West Tofts Army Camp and who want to kick-start the formation of a new environmentally and socially sustainable rural community.