New toolkit aims at injecting life into tired town centres
THE Association of Town & City Management has launched a new toolkit aimed at injecting a fresh stimulus into the region’s town centres and high streets.
The report, Successful town centres – developing effective strategies, is designed to retailers and local planners can meet the challenges facing their communities without having to make substantial investments.
Supported by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the report and accompanying toolkit created is being trialled by Gloucestershire’s Local Economic Partnership, the government’s retail Pathfinder.
The toolkit allows communities to analyse their retail centres and establish what gives them their own identity. It can be used in conjunction with a new National Town Centre Performance Framework, which helps town centres improve their competitiveness and performance by staying true to their roots and ‘personality’.
Business Minister Michael Fallon said: “A successful retail sector needs thriving high streets and town centres – and successful high streets and town centres need a thriving retail sector.
“That is why BIS supported this work to help towns across the country find new ways to keep their high street at the heart of local economies.”
ATCM chief executive Martin Blackwell added: “This is a real breakthrough in thinking and allows us to look at our town centres, high streets and parades in an entirely different way. The old method of classifying places, such a market town, sub-regional centre or city, just didn’t tell you enough about what it’s really like– its personality.
“Determining a town’s personality type is an extremely useful step for developing strategies for reaching out to existing and potential visitors and customers. We look forward to many towns taking advantage of this unique new tool, many elements of which are free to use.”
The report and toolkit can be found on the ATCM website at www.atcm.org
The tools include:
• A town centre classification matrix linked to a ‘personality test’. The study believes every town centre can be classified as one of four main types: community-focused entrepreneurs; sustainable destinations; specialists; or global celebrities.
• A new type of national performance framework for town centres. This enables better monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of a town centre. It focuses on themes such as footfall, vitality, consumer perceptions and economic characteristics and takes into account local, regional, national and global trends which impact on a town centre’s performance.
• A town centre performance toolkit. This allows a monitoring and evaluation system to be put in place for any town centre to check progress towards its vision for the future. It is considered an important way of demystifying town centre performance indicators and identifying how to get the most out of them.
