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If you visit Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon or any other US national park, you’ll most probably base yourself in one of the many ‘gateway’ resorts built specially to cater for visitors.

Similarly, if you book a skiing holiday in the Alps, you’re likely to be staying in a purpose-built resort complete with retail and leisure facilities designed to cater for a seasonal influx of visitors.

But if you want to go hiking or mountain-biking in, say, the Peak District national park right here in the UK, where are you going to stay?

There are no ‘gateway resorts’ catering for visitors to our national parks – but that might be about to change. Land-owner Birchall Properties has planning permission to transform 283 acres (114ha) of reclaimed former opencast land on the edge of the Peak District into the UK’s first gateway resort, appropriately named Peak Gateway. And work has already started to prepare the site for development.

Earlier this year main contractor Booth Group began bulk earthmoving for the land formation of Phase 1 of the scheme, capping the site and profiling it ready for construction works to start. Phase 1 represents a third of the existing consented approval and will occupy 13.6ha, or 12% of the total estate.

The scheme, located on the Birchall estate near Chesterfield, has been a long time coming to fruition – 36 years, in fact.  Outline planning consent for a mixed-use tourist destination was granted in 1989, with numerous revisions and reserved matters added over subsequent years before final planning was granted last year for a total 1.8m sq ft (168,000m2).

Last year’s planning consent brought forward areas and uses of the 1989 outline permission as well as variations to the 2008, 2016 and 2019 reserved matters consents to deliver an updated Phase 1 scheme comprising 224-bed accommodation, leisure and education facilities, retail, hospitality and an ‘energy park’. 

This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

Given the scheme’s long and torturous gestation, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why such a project was conceived in the first place. Birchall Properties director Rupert Carr sets out the reasoning behind the development:

“There are 15 national parks in the UK and the Peak District was the first,” he says. “The park’s surrounded by huge conurbations and receives around 15 million visitors a year while there are only about 38,000 people actually living here.

“The national parks have a mandate to both conserve the environment and provide access for visitors. But the Peak District has only about 6,000 car parking spaces and no hotels with more than 50 beds. So basically there isn’t the infrastructure to support all the visitors it receives.”

“So what we’re trying to do is establish the UK’s first gateway resort town with 2,000 hotels rooms, 250 lodges, parking for 2,850 cars and lots of retail and associated amenities,” explains Carr.

The Birchall estate has a history of industrial use going back to the middle ages and ranging from timber and coal extraction to quarrying, foundry work and, more recently, ammunition testing and packaging in addition to the opencast activities.

The site was extensively strip-mined until the 1980s, when the mine closed and land reclamation began. A 30 acre area to the north east of the estate, now earmarked for car parking and the energy park, was used for landfill of construction materials and closed in the late 1970’s.

Birchall Estates has employed Haslingden-based Booth Group to carry out the landform earthworks largely on the strength of the company’s expertise in regenerative land methods and – crucially – the potential for significant cost reductions.

“We had the land and the planning permission but the start-up costs for such a scheme are colossal,” says Carr. “We’d spent £3.5m on planning alone and it would cost £10m – £15m to open up the site. But then Booth came along and offered to create the landforms for all the roads, car parks, building plots incrementally – all virtually for free!”

Booth Group is not actually providing its services for free – company boss Matthew Booth stresses that there are chargeable services for which Birchall Estates if paying – but its business model is such that it can import huge quantities of clean soil that meets stringent specifications and create the landforms required by Birchall Estates at minimal cost.

This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

“Our business started out as a quarry operator and later added landfill sites too,” says Booth. “It became focused on quarrying and landfill across the northeast and the Midlands.

“But now we specialise in materials management. And the driver for that is development.” While Peak Gateway is the biggest regeneration site Booth has tackled to date, it has carried out numerous smaller-scale projects using surplus arisings from clients’ sites.

Booth explains: “When you’re developing a site, there’s usually a quantity of surplus excavated material that you need to get rid of. Traditionally, that goes to landfill.”

In fact, around 60% of all material sent to landfill is soil, according to Adam Wilson, director of Bradford-based remediation consultant Geo2, which is advising Booth Group.

Booth Group takes this soil and diverts it from landfill for use on land reclamation scheme such as the Peak Gateway. In essence, Booth provides a service to developers with a surplus of excavated material by removing it – for which it gets paid a fee – and then imports the material for reuse on brownfield sites such as Peak.

“If we don’t take that material it will be sent to landfill and classified as waste,” says Wilson. That means there would be a cost levied by the Landfill tax in addition to Booth’s fee for removal. But if the material is reused as part of the circular economy then it becomes a construction material and attracts no extra cost.

To obtain the soil required for land forming at the Birchall estate – estimated to be as much as 400,000 tonnes of it – Booth has identified a number of donor sites within the Chesterfield and south Yorkshire area with each donor site contributing between 1,000 and 10,000 tonnes.

“By supplying this project, every one of those donors is managing their site sustainably,” says Wilson.

Booth is carrying out the work under the Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments (CL:AIRE) code of practice. CL:AIRE is a registered charity that offers an alternative to obtaining an environmental permit from the Environment Agency.

The scheme produces a Definition of Waste Code of Practice (DoW CoP) which establishes rules and guidance for importing waste. One essential requirement is that only undisturbed and naturally-occurring material can be brought onto the site.

Although the CL:AIRE scheme does not require an environmental permit, there is still “lots of Environment Agency scrutiny,” says Geo2’s Adam Wilson.

This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

“We operate a joined-up approval system, inspecting both at source and when it arrives on site. Booth has a software tracking system to monitor deliveries and we map the coordinates of where each delivery is placed.”

In addition to the visual inspections, a full battery of laboratory tests is conducted on every 2,000 tonnes of material arriving on site, says Wilson.

Booth identifies potential donor sites and enters negotiations with the site owner to take the material within a specific time window. Ideally, the material is collected and taken to taken to site for use on a ‘just-in-time’ basis. “Obviously it’s most efficient to use the material straight away as that avoids double-handling and minimises vehicle operations,” says Wilson. But that is not always possible, as Matthew Booth explains:

“Our commercial team is looking for donor sites often months in advance in order to find a source of suitable material. We give them a collection window but we often find that we then get a call saying ‘can you take it tomorrow?’”. Consequently, some material has to be stockpiled on-site at Peak Gateway.

Material started arriving on site in late January with approximately 6,000 tonnes delivered from 10 donor sites. But as the scheme gathers pace these quantities will increase. “We’ve so far identified 16 donor sites, but more sites will evolve as we go along,” says Wilson.

All material is assessed at the donor site but until it has been excavated and thoroughly tested, its chemical and physical properties – and hence its suitability for reuse – cannot be taken for granted. A proportion is likely to be unsuitable for reuse under the CL:AIRE code of practice, says Booth:

“The initial assessment is based on the information we’ve been given by the donor site and we decide what’s likely to happen to it based on that.

“Then we carry out chemical and physical assessments and if we find that it’s contaminated we will send it to landfill; if it’s hazardous waste it’s sent for treatment.” Treatment of hazardous waste might be done by Booth in-house or by a third-party specialist.

All the material that has been accepted for reuse must be placed according to a specification that is verified by Geo2 and which is based on the soil’s chemical and physical properties as well as moisture content.

The material used at Peak Gateway is all subsoil, mostly comprising cohesive clays and granular soils. Besides providing the means of profiling the required landforms, it also caps any underlying contaminants within the old mine-workings.

“We’re both capping the site and profiling it and that requires us to anticipate how the land will behave over time due to settlement,” says Booth. The material is placed in layers, or lifts, and checked by Geo2 between each lift to ensure correct placement. Soil capping depth can vary from less than a metre to several metres depending on the profile and the level of contamination in the ground.

As with many brownfield sites, capping any residual contaminants is more cost-effective than trying to clean the site and remove them. “It’s easier to encapsulate the site than try to establish exactly what’s there,” says Booth. “When you’re working an old industrial site, the records usually aren’t as detailed or as reliable as they would be today.

“Having said that, Peak is very much at the milder end of contamination compared with some of our other sites,” he adds.

Booth Group will continue earthmoving activities at Peak Gateway throughout this year, with the first building plots expected to be released for construction works towards the end of the year. Phase 1 is scheduled to open in 2027/28.

Subsequent phases will include further overnight and short stay accommodation in hotels, lodges and hostels. There are also plans to build a healthcare and wellness campus and conferencing facilities on the site.

Cleaning up with CL:AIRE.

The CL:AIRE code of practice is designed specifically for development purposes and cannot be used for waste disposal.

Although a CL:AIRE scheme does not involve a formal application process, it does require a substantial amount of information relating to the origin of the material and handling during the material import to mitigate the risk of pollution. This means maintaining meticulous records and collecting samples for laboratory chemical analysis.

Each CL:AIRE scheme must create a comprehensive materials management plan (MMP) containing essential information about the proposed development and details about the origins of the material imported from donor sites.

This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

To add materials to an MMP there is a variety of information that is required. This includes a comprehensive site investigation report, including chemical testing which provides insights into the excavation source and any existing contamination of the materials.

For materials to be eligible for the MMP and re-use, they must be free of contamination and in an undisturbed, virgin-dug condition. The MMP must also include details such as the site owner, main contractor, and haulage company involved in the material transportation process.

By gathering and documenting this information, the MMP ensures responsible materials management, promotes environmental protection, and enables the smooth execution of the development project while adhering to CL:AIRE scheme guidelines and regulations.

Playing the long game

“When I first got involved with this I was in my 20s,” says Birchall Estates director Rupert Carr. “I’m now in my early 60s.”

Making the Peak Gateway vision a reality has been a long and frustrating experience, he admits.

In 1989 the Birchall estate was a derelict former opencast mine and for most of the ensuing 35 years (barring a brief period during which it became a golf course) the site has been managed with the consented development in mind.

Birchall Estates eventually secured reserved matters permission for the Peak Gateway scheme in 2008 “and the next week Lehman Brothers collapsed and nobody could get finance,” recalls Carr.

Recovery from the global recession was gradual but in 2015 Carr found a US investor willing to back the scheme.

But then came another blow: the 2016 Brexit referendum taking the UK out of the EU. “Nobody would invest amid such uncertainty and our US investor withdrew”, says Carr.

Then just four years later covid struck – another global upheaval but with an unexpected after-effect, says Carr. “Coming out of covid the thinking completely changed and the conditions were right for a proposition promoting the outdoors,” he says.

The covid lockdowns seemed to inspire a new appreciation of the natural environment and, as they lifted, more and more people felt the urge to venture out into places like the Peak District.

Carr believes that schemes like Peak Gateway were seen in a new light. “Everything happens for a reason and we arrived in 2025 with a new norm,” he says. “In fact I now think that if we’d gone ahead at any of the previous opportunities we had, it wouldn’t have worked. We have a much better site and the capital markets are much clearer now.”

Keeping it green

It is only to be expected that a scheme of this scale and ambition, situated on the edge of a national park, should be subject to close scrutiny. Planning permission has understandably placed a strong emphasis on requiring significant environmental undertakings by the developer.

Besides cleaning up the site and preparing it for development, Birchall Properties has established stringent standards of both carbon reduction and nature gains.

Booth Group is monitoring the carbon emissions of every piece of equipment on site as well as tracking emissions from delivery vehicles and even employees’ travel to and from the site. The company is also using ‘low-carbon’ fuels, including hydro-treated vegetable oil (HVO) in all of its earthmoving equipment; electricity for its site welfare facilities is generated by solar panels.

 This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

While the 30 acre cleared works site represents just 10% of the reclaimed estate, Booth Group is also contributing to biodiversity improvements across the entire estate. Work exclusion zones have also been established to protect sensitive areas such as badger setts, trees and hedgerows.

Given the increased focus on water management and flood alleviation, managing surface water impact on site is crucial. We’ve developed a comprehensive surface water management plan included in our Construction Environmental Management Plan (CEMP), to ensures that all surface water is intercepted, and local watercourses remain protected from pollution or silting.

Around 70% of the reclaimed estate will be will aside for continued biodiversity. “We keep 30% of it aside for the consented project; the rest is given over to passive regeneration,” says Carr.

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