The Safety Letterbox Company supplied Willmott Dixon £4 million housing project with its mailboxes in Kevin Mc Clouds award winning TV series 'The Big Town Plan' based in north Swindon as an example of creating sustainable communities with well designed, enviromentally friendly housing.

The specification required individual external mailboxes to be sited on the outside of the newly developed houses. Forty two mailboxes were supplied to the Triangle site with weather cladding and larger than standard numerals on the face of the boxes.

By siting the mailboxes on the exterior of the houses and having no letterflaps in the doors the development then complied with ‘Secured by Design’ guidelines.

The new eco-development offers residents a shared community kitchen garden and has been created to promote a sustainable lifestyle and a sense of community.

The Triangle, a 42-home scheme south of Swindon, is the Grand Designs presenter's first development.

"Every resident here, we did interview quite rigorously about the values of the scheme but they all bought into it," said Mr McCloud.

Swindon Borough Council gave the green light for the development, off Northern Avenue in Swindon, in October 2009.

Construction of the terraced eco-homes, a "contemporary interpretation of Swindon's Victorian railway cottages", began in May 2010.

"We've got shared kitchen gardens rather than allotments. We've got a shared public space which everybody on the scheme collectively owns through a community trust and we've got a car-share club," said Mr McCloud.

The joint venture between McCloud's company Hab and the housing group GreenSquare has been designed to "encourage people to spend more time outside" and to "socialise more".

"I thought it would actually have been harder to find people who really did understand and like the value of the scheme," said Mr McCloud.

The development includes homes for intermediate rent, rent-to-homebuy and for affordable rent to local people registered with Swindon Borough Council.

Further developments are being planned in Stroud and Oxford and sites in Chippenham and Bristol are also being considered.