This paper describes the initial steps in a larger effort to perform verification and validation (V&V) of wind simulations in an urban environment. The presented work uses data from wind tunnel experiments on a simplified urban area to assess the performance of the steady-state RANS octree immersed boundary flow solver IBOFlow®. Verification and validation activities are indispensable in computational modelling, because they address the issue about the trustworthiness of models directly. This is particularly so in the modelling of complex systems such as urban environments. The results of the early V&V work are presented, together with a discussion on different aspects of the experimental and modelling settings. A key contribution of this work, which is planned as a first in a series of V&V publications, is the identification of concrete future actions to address the issues of trust in urban wind model predictions.