We are excited to share that we have brought together Australian and United Kingdom know-how, to create a pilot course for boosting ‘pride in place’ in neighbourhoods, towns and city centres. And like all good community participation, we are inviting existing and would-be placemakers and managers from communities, councils and commercial interests to help…
The Streets Ahead report published by the Royal Society of Public Health seeks to provide guidance and recommendations for “building health on the high street”. As a specialised report, it is remarkably striking in the synergy it shows with wider approaches to revitalising town and city centres. The steps that the Streets Ahead report by…
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it! Here we focus on how to turn-around town centres by supporting collaborative placemaking. This is based on the People & Places Partnership’s work to help Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council review how it supports communities in revitalising six town centres. It also draws…
I believe that everyone has at least one culinary cultural tale inside them. Some, have many more. Such tales often begin with something like, “If you go into city centre, make sure you get something to eat at…” Put the tales together and we start to create a city’s culinary cultural story book. Food as…
Amongst the many performance measures to be expected in the ‘post-programme findings of the High Streets Task Force’, I was most interested to read and understand the final section titled ‘legacy’. This concluding section of the report published recently by the Institute of Place Management (IPM), presents suggestions for long-term learning and impact by presenting…
All in the same boat and rowing in the same direction; pick your nautical metaphors for creating a place partnership behind a plan. Our prognosis, backed by experience and evidence, is that the towns and cities that progress beyond expectations over the next decade, will be those with an action-oriented partnership behind an evidence-based plan.…
What should we read into signs of the government’s place-based approach increasingly focusing policy on neighbourhood renewal? This March saw the publication of two key pointers to such a government focus on addressing decline at the ‘neighbourhood’ level. The rebranding of the Long Term Plan for Towns to the Plan for Neighbourhoods, was accompanied by…
Faced with frequent calls from businesses and customers for free parking in towns centres, I often liken it to expecting a free coffee in a town centre cafe. Yes, that might be welcomed though what would the coffee be like and would the cafe stay open for long? Here I look a little more in…
This Best Practice Guide to Place Visioning was written for by Katie Norman of the Design Council for the High Streets Task Force and published in 2024. Introduction to place visioning The guide describes a place vision as a galvanising resource that describes the future aspirations for a specific location. It sets-out how it captures the…
‘Putting partnerships in place’ seems such an obvious prerequisite to revitalising town and city centres, that sometimes it seems surprising to see it promoted as part of good practice. It was great though recently, to be reminded of our work in Lincoln when reading the latest Institute of Place Management (IPM) case study on the…