IN Brief:
- AJC Group has won both phases of the £23.9m Hawkwood Road scheme in Boscombe.
- The project will deliver a community centre, retail kiosks, apartments, commercial space, and public realm.
- Site clearance and groundworks are scheduled to begin in July.
AJC Group has been appointed to deliver a £23.9m regeneration scheme at Hawkwood Road in Boscombe, Bournemouth.
The Poole-based contractor has secured both phases of the development for Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. The project will combine community facilities, retail space, homes, commercial floorspace, and public realm on a site earmarked for wider local renewal.
Phase one will deliver a new two-storey community centre, four retail kiosks, a pedestrian link, landscaping, drainage, and community space improvements. Phase two will add 68 apartments and commercial space across three buildings, alongside a public park, cycle storage, refuse facilities, parking, highways works, and further landscaping.
Work is scheduled to begin in July with site clearance and groundworks, creating the platform for the first phase of delivery. Later works will then bring forward the residential and commercial elements within the broader regeneration plan.
AJC Group specialises in affordable housing and residential-led development across Dorset and Hampshire. The company is already delivering several schemes across the region, including the regeneration of the former Buzz Bingo site in Bournemouth town centre.
The Hawkwood Road scheme brings together several of the elements now common in council-led regeneration: housing, social infrastructure, small-scale commercial space, public realm, active travel, and local connectivity. Rather than relying on one large anchor development, the project uses a mix of smaller components to strengthen the function of a local centre.
That mix will shape the construction challenge. The contractor will need to coordinate highways works, drainage, landscaping, pedestrian movement, public-facing facilities, residential construction, commercial units, and site logistics within an established urban area. Access, deliveries, noise, dust, parking, temporary works, and public safety will all carry heightened importance once work begins.
For local authorities, projects of this type sit at the point where housing delivery meets place-making. New homes can increase density and support local services, but regeneration only gains traction when public space, community facilities, commercial activity, and safe movement are delivered together. A community centre, kiosks, pedestrian routes, and parkland are therefore not decorative additions; they are part of how the completed scheme is expected to function.
Boscombe has long been a focus for renewal, with pressure to improve housing choice, public realm, local services, and economic activity. Hawkwood Road will not carry that agenda on its own, but a deliverable mixed-use scheme gives the council and its partners a visible construction start on land with regeneration potential.
The contract also highlights the role of regional contractors in rebuilding housing and regeneration capacity. National targets tend to focus attention on volume housebuilders and major urban extensions, yet many practical sites are smaller, more constrained, and more dependent on local delivery teams. Regional contractors, councils, housing associations, development partners, and local supply chains often bring forward the schemes that do not fit neatly into larger speculative models.
That capacity is becoming a more active policy concern as SME developers and regional builders face planning delays, finance pressure, land caution, and viability constraints. Efforts to strengthen local delivery, including new regional forums for place-based building, reflect the need for more routes into housing and regeneration than the largest developers alone can provide.
Public-sector projects still face their own constraints. Council finances remain tight, funding packages can be complex, and mixed-use schemes require careful sequencing if community, commercial, and residential elements are to open without leaving unfinished edges. Early groundworks and enabling infrastructure will therefore set the tone for the wider programme.
Once completed, the Hawkwood Road scheme will be judged by how well its elements work together. Homes, public space, commercial units, pedestrian links, and community facilities need to support each other rather than sit as separate outputs on the same site. For AJC Group, the contract extends its regional housing and regeneration workload at a time when local delivery capacity is receiving closer attention.
