Energising the North’s Town Centres

Written by

Emily Thomson, Planner at Lichfields

Summer 2021 saw the announcement of substantial amounts of funding from the Government for various towns across England. For the North East, this means the region is benefiting from approximately £274m of funding, a significant sum which aims to support town centre and high street regeneration. The current North East funding pot is split into three main funds, comprising £172.3m from the Towns Fund, £98.5m from the Future High Streets Fund and around £3m from the High Street Heritage Action Zones. The funding is allocated across various towns, on different scales, throughout the region.

So what is happening in the North East? Most recently, Blyth, located in south east Northumberland, has been awarded £21m from the Towns Fund – bringing the amount granted to Blyth to an impressive total of approximately £32.1m, as the town had already received around £11.1m from the Future High Streets Fund. The funding will contribute to the Energising Blyth programme of major initiatives, with the aim of growing Blyth into an international centre of renewable energy and advance manufacturing growth and innovation. This follows from the granting of the new gigaplant factory for electric car batteries in July, on the former Blyth Power Station site.

Where does this leave Blyth Town Centre? Well, the funding will support the reconfiguration of the Market Place and creation of ‘Creative Culture Space’ which aims to provide animation, landscaping and play facilities, creating flexible spaces for a variety of uses. A dedicated one-way, bus only route will also be introduced through the town to bring people into the heart of Blyth. These schemes will help to ensure that Blyth Town Centre is well placed to benefit from the planned increases in economic activity across the wider area.

What are the next steps and how will Blyth guarantee this funding? Following the grant of funding, there is a 12-month period for business cases to be prepared for each initiative and currently Blyth is in this process with the help of Lichfields. Lichfields has been appointed to a panel to both develop business cases and critically review others to allow for the funding to come forward and the initiatives to progress.

As explained in our recent ‘Moving On Up? Levelling up town centres across Northern England’ Insight, Lichfields has been at the forefront of Government funding activity in the North East. For Redcar and Bishop Auckland, this involved inputs to Towns Fund bids, both of which were successful with funding awards of £25 million and £33.2 million respectively. In addition, Lichfields recently obtained outline planning permission for Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council  working alongside Ryder Architecture for a new urban park and other mixed use buildings in Stockton-on-Tees Town Centre on the site of the former Castlegate Shopping Centre, which will connect Stockton’s High Street to the River Tees.

For Stockton Town Centre, the granting of permission for the new urban park is fantastic news. With a declining retail sector, manifesting itself in a unit vacancy rate almost twice the national average, this park will create an attractive, festival-ready space with the intention of drawing more people in to the centre and generating spin-off benefits for existing shops and services. It will also allow the Council to consolidate the retail offer elsewhere into a more compact core, focused on the Wellington Square Shopping Centre (which the Council also own).

As well as Stockton, Lichfields has also helped secure funding for town centre regeneration in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. This funding seeks to capitalise on the cultural and heritage aspects of the town centre. Here, the funding is focused on making the town centre more attractive to visitors whilst making the most of museums and art galleries created by private individuals and the nearby Kynren outdoor theatrical performance at Auckland Castle. Bishop Auckland will continue to capitalise on its heritage assets and bring forward various projects to build upon its success of regenerating the Town Centre.

It’s clear that funding granted by the Government is to be used for a variety of initiatives in the North East. It’s a ‘watch this space’ moment, with the successful projects from the Government’s Levelling Up Fund to be announced later this year, which is likely to include a number in the North-East and significant potential to regenerate the region’s High Streets. In fact, Local Authorities are gearing up for this funding and Lichfields are already supporting clients to develop Levelling Up Fund submissions. Please get in touch with our Newcastle Office if you have any queries on this and we will be happy to help.

Emily Thomson, Planner, Lichfields

This article originally appeared on the Lichfields website.

Image via the Tees Valley Combined Authority.

Moving on up? Levelling-up town centres across Northern England

Written by

It has, without question, been a challenging year for our town and city centres. As the global pandemic continues and lockdowns come and go, a raft of the nation’s most famous retailers have disappeared from high streets across the country. As in the rest of the developed world, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a ‘game changer’ for the sector. With the growth in online shopping over the last decade or so, most centres had already devised strategies based on re-focusing their offer away from retailing and toward a leisure and food and beverage-based offer.

However, successive lockdowns have acted as a catalyst in speeding up changes in shopping behaviour, and impacted directly on the leisure and hospitality sector to the extent that it is now quite unclear how centres will function as restrictions ease.

In the North of England, our town and city centres have suffered more than most in recent years. While Covid-19 has sped up the process of change, even prior to the pandemic many centres were already experiencing major challenges due to both changes in shopping behaviour and weak underlying economic conditions.

The Government’s Levelling Up Fund Prospectus, published in March 2021, identifies a total of £4.8 billion to be invested over the coming years to support town centre and high street regeneration, local transport projects, and cultural and heritage assets across the country.

In addition to the Levelling Up Fund, as part of the Government’s wider package of interventions, there are three key funding streams, which have already seen a great deal of uptake across the North:

  • Future High Streets Fund – This fund seeks to allocate £830 million to help deliver transformative changes to struggling high streets;
  • Towns Fund – 100 cities, towns and areas have been invited to bid for part of this £3.6 billion fund designed for proposals which drive economic growth. In many places, town centres are integral to these schemes; and
  • High Street Heritage Action Zones – Seeking to transform High Street buildings which can help to fuel economic, social and cultural recovery.

Town centre stakeholders are responding with a range of radical and ambitious projects. These include strategic interventions by local authorities, including through the acquisition of shopping centres and use of Compulsory Purchase Order powers.

With innovative and ambitious strategies now in place in many towns – and Government funding available to support delivery – there are grounds for optimism over the future of our town centres.

Lichfields’ Insight, ‘Moving on up? Levelling up Town Centres across Northern England’, reviews the various different funding bids currently under consideration. Using this research, we have identified six key themes which underpin the different plans and strategies currently under consideration. These are:

  • Health and Wellbeing – With the demise of retail, we need to find a reason to draw visitors into town centres. As well as more pleasant and healthy outdoor spaces and experiences, this could also involve locating other essential services close to transport hubs where they can help to maintain footfall.
  • Education – Universities and colleges have long been key parts of daily life in our city centres. Opportunities exist to locate student populations in the heart of these centres, where they can contribute to vitality and viability.
  • Tourism – Many of the North’s town and cities have fascinating visitor attractions and dramatic physical and geographical environs. An ambitious and coherent tourism strategy should seek to make the most of these unique assets to drive trips to their town centres.
  • Heritage – The North has a rich and varied history, the remnants of which live on in many of our town and city centres. They can make a real contribution to the environment and attractiveness of these towns as visitor destinations.
  • Digital and creative – Whilst retail may never return to its previous levels, flexibility is required to re-purpose the floorspace left behind by these vacancies. Utilising new funding streams and planning reforms, space should be made to accommodate innovative small businesses which will contribute to the vibrancy and culture of town centres.
  • Town centre living – As retail space recedes, we need to ensure our town centres remain attractive places to live. As well as making an invaluable contribution to housing supply in our urban areas, maintaining a meaningful 24-hour population in town centres will in turn drive demand for services and facilities which contribute to the vitality and viability of the centres.

With these themes in mind, our Insight provides evidence across the North of innovation, optimism and ambition in the town centre sector, which means the future may not be as bleak as many sceptics would have you believe.

Robert Dibden, Associate Director, Lichfields

This blog originally appeared on the Lichfields website here.

You can read and download their full insights report here.

Photo by Charlie Green on Unsplash