If your town or city centre is changing significantly and quickly, it makes a big difference to your approach to tackling vacancy.
It’s one of a range of reasons we ought to be very cautious about publishing league tables of empty shops rates.
The change you’re seeing might be a variety of development and repurposing projects or infrastructure / public realm initiatives or a combination of the two…
…but it for sure is going to mean the ‘next steps’ your ‘place partnership’ takes to reduce the number of empty units and improve the mix of uses will need adjusting.
Why…?
Firstly you might need to see how any development shakes out before getting a clear picture of the types of businesses and organisations you’d best attract;
Also you’ll likely find that property owners prefer to wait before committing to longer lease agreements, same with would-be occupiers who may also be keen to avoid opening if there’ll be disruption during any works programme.
This suggests, for example, that you might have to prioritise a short term let / #popupshop / ‘meanwhile… use’ approach to getting units back in play for a year or two or more.
One thing that is key though is to be doing what you can to support existing valued businesses through the change period, especially if it’ll have an impact on the look, feel, access to and operation of your #highstreet for weeks or months or longer.
It’s a scenario we see in different places on our travels – Sunderland, Grimsby, Bradford might be recent #Evolving examples…
…and it felt like an important part of the conversation in Llanelli this week. It’s a town centre with lots to like – as the image set shows – including an impressive set of buildings, some tied to its history and heritage, a strong and attractive group of independent businesses and, crucially for this thread of thinking, much happening with more in the pipeline.
We’re really looking forward to working with the Carmarthenshire County Council town centres team here and in Carmarthen and Ammanford which we’ll visit next.
It’d be really interesting to hear from #placemaking colleagues in other locations that are at a similar stage in their journey…
