<b><b>Mawsley Village, near Kettering, by Alfred McAlpine Homes East Midlands</b></b><br><b><b>Jeremy Gates takes a trip to Northamptonshire where Alfred McAlpine is leading the way in the development of a new 750 home village </b></b><br><b>As a stopping point on a busy main road, or as a tranquil bolthole surrounded by open fields outside a crowded urban area, English villages tend to develop over several centuries with homes gradually filling the gaps between church, school, public house, shops and sports ground. </b><br><b><b>Instant village </b></b><br> Mawsley, by contrast, was devised and designed in a decade, an &amp;"instant village&amp;" created at the whim of local authority town planners. <p></p><p>In 1989, Kettering Borough Council recognised that villages surrounding the town would all have to be greatly expanded to meet rural housing demand. Alternatively, they could be left alone if all new development was channelled into an entirely new community. </p><p>Mawsley, two turns off the busy A43 route running north east from Northampton to Kettering, was confirmed in the Local Plan in 1994. Five years later, McAlpine began the purchase of the 137-acre site, and construction of the first phase of homes around the main village street began in spring 2000. </p><p>Infrastructure costs, even at that point, …