Tempsford: How a new train line will turn historic village into boom town

This is where Boudicca rallied against the Romans, they tell you in Tempsford. Where the early English kings fought off the Danes and where Churchill launched secret flights to aid resistance fighters keeping the Nazis at bay.

- Gwyn Topham

But the earthworks, wheat fields and RAF base of Tempsford may prove no match for a chancellor bent on housebuilding and growth and armed with thinktank reports and a 10-year infrastructure plan.

The name of the tiny Bedfordshire village may have been unfamiliar to most before Rachel Reeves announced plans to accelerate a "growth arc" between Oxford and Cambridge. Last month, the government confirmed plans for Tempsford to be the site of a brand new railway station, where the planned East West Rail linking the university cities meets the east coast mainline from London.

For any of the three cities, Tempsford could be an appealing commuter base. But some have seen far more potential. As the Labour government came to power pledging 1.5m new homes, a report from UK Day One urged that they should be built as part of brand new towns. And there was one obvious contender.

It was quite a moment for the 600 residents of Tempsford to learn of plans to swell their ranks to 350,000 people, says David Sutton, chair of the parish council and landlord of the village pub, the Wheatsheaf. A previous local Bedfordshire plan had identified possible development, and the county has seen plenty of fields give way to housing estates, solar farms or wind turbines. He says: "There had been talk of 10,000 or 20,000 houses - then out of nowhere came this 350,000 [people] figure."

According to Sutton, local reaction ranged "from apathy, saying, 'well nothing's happened yet', to 'we have to move away'."

The post-war new towns of Stevenage and Welwyn and the success story of the 1960s wave of building, Milton Keynes, are all not far away. At about the same time Tempsford saw its century-old station closed in Richard Beeching's 60s restructuring of the country's rail network, and was itself bisected by the expanded A1.