Cake.
Always a welcome addition to the offer in a town or city centre we’re supporting with tackling #highstreet vacancy, and especially when it’s by one of a number of new independent businesses to open up there.
It’s been an encouraging latest visit to Tredegar town centre for lots of reasons.
- Four new businesses have opened in the town centre in recent weeks, with two maybe three more in the pipeline. This private sector belief and investment is a real positive and emphasises the importance of building on that by helping facilitate take-up of other empty units;
- As part of that we’ve progressed conversations with arts & crafts, creative, culture, community, health & wellbeing organisations to the point of building a proposal for landlords;
- And the ‘look’ improvements being led by council colleagues are becoming more noticeable by the visit and getting positive feedback from residents and businesses alike.
We took time this visit to consider ‘next steps’ including a focus on another tranche of vacant units, more #streetart and street scene works, and reaching out to community groups we’ve not yet talked to about the potential role they could play.
As we always say, it’s not just about numbers, the mix of uses is important too, but I’m sticking with the target I share with every location we work on tackling vacancy: to (at least) halve your empty units rate in 18 months (or maybe quicker).
It’d be great to hear what targets you’ve set for your town or city centre…
