On Friday 5th June, St Neots lays a single 200-seat table down the length of its Market Square and invites the town to sit down, launching the biggest community listening exercise in its history and a 15-year plan to grow with the billions of pounds of investment arriving on its doorstep, rather than be left behind by it.
St Neots, Cambridgeshire – A market town in Cambridgeshire is preparing for the biggest economic shift in a generation and it is starting not with a strategy document but with a conversation.
On Friday 5th June, St Neots Initiative will lay one continuous table seating 200 people down the length of Market Square and invite the town to sit down. It is the launch of The Big Listen, the first day of a 15-year civic programme, SNI 2040, built to make sure local people shape how a wave of regional growth lands in their town.
That growth is not speculative. Universal Studios has full planning permission for its first European theme park near Bedford, around eight miles away, opening in 2031 and expected to draw 8.5 million visitors a year and create more than 8,000 jobs. East-West Rail is building a new station at Tempsford, on St Neots’ boundary, connecting the town into the Oxford-Cambridge corridor from 2030. And the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority has committed, in its approved Local Growth Plan, to tripling the region’s economic output. All three are funded, approved and under way. What has not yet been decided, organisers say, is what St Neots does with them.
“Tripling regional economic output means very little to a family in St Neots if the jobs, the skills and the investment flow to somewhere better prepared. The question is not whether growth is coming. It is whether the people who live and work here have any say in the shape of it. The Big Listen is how we make sure they do.”
— Alex Hughes, Vice Chair, St Neots Initiative, and founder of Citizen Hub
The day is free and open to everyone, with no ticket required. From 10am to 5pm, residents, business owners, young people and civic leaders will sit alongside one another at the table, while a main stage hosts conversations on the town’s economy, infrastructure, young people and wellbeing, and twenty marquees line the square. Citizen Hub, which adjoins Market Square, will run a parallel programme on community wellbeing, social enterprise and volunteering.
At the centre of it are three questions:
- What do you love about St Neots?
- What could be better in St Neots?
- What would make St Neots a great place to live?
The answers will not sit in a report. They will be mapped across the town through the Community Power Unit: a live, publicly visible platform that turns conversations into a real-time picture of what the town thinks, wants and needs. At the close of the day, the Initiative will launch Tables Across Town, inviting pubs, businesses, community groups and schools to host their own listening tables through the year that follows.
“St Neots Initiative has been doing this work for 29 years, not because someone pays us to, but because volunteers, residents, business owners and councillors showed up and decided this town was worth the effort. SNI 2040 is the framework for making the most of the moment in front of us.”
— Richard Shaw MBE, Chair, St Neots Initiative
This carries the backing of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, Huntingdonshire District Council, St Neots Town Council, Urban & Civic and Cambridgeshire County Council, a commitment confirmed through the High Street Crisis Roundtable convened by the Initiative in late 2025.
The Big Listen runs from 10am to 5pm on Friday 5th June 2026 in Market Square, St Neots. Entry is free. Details at www.thebiglistenevent.com