The consultancy behind this address

2 Fanhams Hall Road in Ware, Hertfordshire, was for twelve years the registered address of Ashley Godfrey Associates, an independent planning and leisure consultancy that operated from 2007 until its closure in 2019. The firm closed when its founder, Ashley Godfrey, retired, bringing to an end what the practice itself described as twelve successful years of work for clients in the public, private and voluntary sectors.

The practice worked across a recognisable span of late-2000s and 2010s British planning practice: land-use planning and planning application management, parks and green spaces, playing pitch strategies, open space assessment, children's play, community consultation, heritage, business planning and feasibility, and performance management. Archived pages preserved by the Wayback Machine record how the firm described its services, its team and its client list.

A small practice built around a core and its associates

Ashley Godfrey Associates was structured as a core practice working with associates at director level. The firm's website listed an Associates page alongside pages for The Team and Contact, indicating a model in which experienced freelance specialists were brought in for particular commissions. The community consultation page, for example, noted that the firm had a specialist associate who was a long-standing expert in survey design and analysis.

This associate model was common among planning and leisure consultancies of this size. It allowed a small head office, in this case a residential address in Ware, to bid for and deliver work requiring several distinct skill sets: quantitative survey work, facilitation, play provision auditing, and the mapping and analysis that underpinned open space assessments. Readers interested in how that wider craft operated can find more in the craft of planning practice.

Children's play: a signature specialism

Of the services the firm listed, children's play appears most prominently in the archived record. The practice described considerable involvement over a long period in developing play opportunities for children and young people, working both at a strategic level and directly with local communities and providers.

The archived text sets out national-level contributions. Ashley Godfrey Associates worked with Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the development of performance indicators for children's play, intended to provide a robust assessment of the extent to which local authorities were providing children and young people with good, inclusive and accessible free local play spaces, services and facilities. Ashley Godfrey personally sat on the advisory group for the preparation of Planning for Play, Play England's guidance for the preparation of play strategies.

The firm also worked with Haki Kapasi on the development of the Quality Assessment Tool for play, and with Bristol City Council on a play questionnaire designed for completion by children themselves. A further collaboration with Fields in Trust, the former NPFA, developed national benchmarks for different types of play space, giving local authorities a point of reference when setting their own locally determined provision standards. Those benchmarks are discussed further in the Fields in Trust benchmarks, and the wider assessment tradition in how children's play provision is assessed.

Community consultation and open space work

The firm's archived consultation page emphasised rigour and inclusion. It described an extensive toolkit of methodologies, combining traditional approaches with adaptations designed to reach groups that did not normally respond to standard tactics. On the quantitative side this included postal surveys, online surveys and self-completion forms. The firm recorded that response levels of 35 per cent or more on a 12-page postal survey were not exceptional for its work.

Qualitatively, the practice used focus groups and workshops with members of the public, stakeholder interests and elected members. The archived text notes that facilitators were tasked with ensuring the inclusion of all group members, including the less articulate, and that the firm had developed group tasks intended to be entertaining but strongly relevant. These claims are the practice's own, quoted from its archived website.

Consultation and survey work of this kind fed directly into the open space and recreation studies that formed another pillar of the firm's offering. The methodology landscape of that era, from PPG17 assessments through to the NPPF, is covered in from PPG17 to the NPPF, and the survey and audit tradition in surveys and audits of local provision.

The archived client list

The practice's archived materials name a set of clients that reflects its specialisms in open space, play and leisure planning:

• Cambridge
• Harrow
• Erewash
• South Gloucestershire
• Thurrock
• Haringey
• Nene Park Trust

Most of these are local authorities, consistent with the firm's strategic work on play strategies, playing pitch strategies and open space assessments for councils. The inclusion of Nene Park Trust, a charitable trust managing a large country park in Northamptonshire, points to the firm's green space and play work beyond local government. Case notes on this site cover two commissions in that territory: the Harrow PPG17 study and the Nene Park play trail.

Closure and record

Ashley Godfrey Associates ceased trading in 2019 when Ashley Godfrey retired. The firm was independent throughout its twelve years, and no successor practice operates from the Ware address under that name. This page is a historical record only: it draws on archived versions of the firm's own website and makes no claim that the practice, or its associates, continue to trade.

What the archived record preserves is a picture of one mid-sized consultancy's place in a particular period of British planning: the national play strategy programme of the late 2000s, the performance indicator work with Play England and DCMS, the benchmark development with Fields in Trust, and the steady run of open space, playing pitch and consultation studies for councils across England. The firm's own summary of those years, twelve successful years, is quoted here with attribution to its archived site.