Tag: High Street Task Force

Reopening the High Street with an Integrated Model

The deserted high street of Shaftesbury in Dorset.
Usually, it is full of people and cars, however, due to the current pandemic, it was like a ghost town. The stay safe road markings have obviously been adhered to.
Image by Nick Fewings (@jannerboy62) on unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/9V3_fkI8Ewc

By Dr Julian Zarb*

When we eventually start to reopen our High Streets we must be sure that this is a process which belongs to all the key stakeholders – the local authority, the local businesses and the local community.  We want the High Street to reflect the local community, to be a social as well as a cultural hub for people not simply a commercial centre that lacks the personality and the identity of that locality. 

As a member of the High Streets Task Force my role will be to listen and not just to hear stakeholders; I will have to ensure that all stakeholders take real ownership of the plan to re-open the High street – THEIR High Street, not mine, not the HSTF’s High Street, but the High Street that the local community feels they can identify with.  A few weeks ago I was watching an interesting time-series on BBC 2 about the life and the demise of the corner shop. We need to look at the corner shop, not simply as a convenience metro shop but as a point of contact for locals, somewhere where they can meet a familiar face, talk to them and get real personal service and hospitality again.  High Streets are about this local environment and in this next article I will share with you the process that I have designed after some ten years of research on the implementation of an Integrated Approach to Planning (Figure 1).

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Re-Opening the High Street

Mellieha bay as it was in the 1960s

by Julian Zarb*

In 2008 I was working for the Government of Malta when I was commissioned by the Office of the Prime Minister to prepare a draft local tourism plan for one of the island’s most established resorts in the northern part of Malta, Mellieha.  I carried out this project by working with the community rather than for the community.  I set up my office during this period at the Local Council in Mellieha.  It took over six months to work on the local tourism plan but it was really invigorating because this was not about writing an administrative report  for politicians and businesses, but it was about really seeing how the community felt about tourism and their locality.  This was a locality where the sense of belonging was still relatively high, it was a locality where 25% of the local residents were involved in tourism – directly or indirectly.  It was a locality where the local resident and the visitor community shared services and experiences. 

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The collapse of the House of Cards

by Graham Galpin and Tom Hindmarch

The last few weeks have been some of the worst for retail in my memory, however it was both a disaster and an accident waiting to happen. Arcadia entered Administration on 1 December, and it was not really a surprise to those in the retail industry. What had perhaps passed some of us by was the downstream consequence of this. The house of cards is collapsing.

The cause of the collapse

The collapse of retail chains is nothing new, the arcadia group joins a long list of stores that have suffered a similar fate as traditional retailers struggle with changing market trends and consumer habits. In a recent webinar, Danny Crump (Director of Urbanism at BroadwayMalyan) identified that as recently as 1971, 70% of retail was supplied from 29,000 retailers, in contrast by 2000 this had reduced to 70% from 100. It appears to indicate a top-heavy market with limited choice and towns relying on the same big brands in their centre to compete with other urban clusters. I admit that when I was a senior local authority councillor I encouraged the pursuit of the “big names”, which in hindsight I regret.

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Rethinking public space

By Sergiy Palamarchuk – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41768578

By Martin Blackwell[1]

Early on, at the start of the current crisis I wrote a blog about the importance of public space.  Even before that, in Feb while we were still hearing about this weird outbreak in China, I wrote about Parklets.

These things come together in a terrific article in the Guardian that asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport.  From Cycle Superhighways to Garden Streets.  Unfortunately, these plans often don’t take account the views of the entrenched car driver or business owner that might be impacted.  This reminded me of the work we did at ATCM looking at pedestrianisation.  It was hard to find anyone in favour before pedestrianisation was put in place, but equally hard to find anyone who would change back afterwards!

I recall taking the ATCM’s Key Cities Group to a study tour of The Hague in the Netherlands.  We saw the results of a long, straight road that had had the traffic taken out.  The key takeaway for me wasn’t the design or landscaping. It was how they went about it.  All the businesses that would be impacted by the disruption caused by the works were given two choices:

  1. Stay open and we will work around you.  It will take 3 months to complete the works.
  2. Close for 4 weeks and we’ll work around the clock to get everything completed and re-opened.
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Funding towns: Good policy or electioneering?

Cathy Parker

By Prof Cathy Parker

Whilst the current political and economic uncertainty surrounding Brexit is generating division and negativity at a national level, there have been a lot of new policy announcements recently that are, paradoxically, good news for local town centres and high streets.

The Budget of October 2018 promised to cut the business rate bills of small retailers by one-third; a package that is worth nearly £1bn[1].  At the same time, the £675m Future High Streets Fund was launched to support the transformation of England’s high streets, from mono-functional retail centres to multifunctional community hubs. The October 2018 Budget also announced the creation of a High Streets Task Force, to provide much-needed expertise, training, data and insight to the place leaders and partnerships that are reinventing their local areas, with a budget of just over £8.6m for 5 years. The Institute of Place Management is leading a consortium of partners to run the High Street Task Force, which will be fully operational by July 2020.

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