What might seem like quite small positive changes can definitely make my day on a town centre visit.
The lead image is one that did.
It’s a now very long-time empty unit in Banbury that you see early on a walk-see if you start (as I mostly do in places) from the rail station.
But this time – having looked increasingly worse for wear for years – it has now been painted.
I’ve no idea if this means it has a new owner or even better a would-be occupier on the case, but…
Banbury isn’t a location we have a tackling highstreet vacancy commission but it is one I know well having had a town team role there for a few years, and it’s somewhere I always think has a lot to like including…
- An attractive set of heritage buildings;
- A still strong and varied group of independents and a range of national brands and banks;
- The canal (with its new largely leisure-focused operators alongside);
- A shopping centre which is grappling with the changing face of retail and encouragingly introducing some of our ‘alternative’ / additional use types instead;
- A sizeable commercial sector in units around the core town centre that could be customers for its retail, hospitality and services offer;
- Some really interesting opportunities among the visibly vacant units as well as signs of investment and repurposing underway with others.
We haven’t done an ‘audit’ there so don’t know what the exact empty unit numbers are, but it has the players you need for a tackling vacancy-focused ‘place partnership’, and with all the town’s strengths you’d be confident it could be one of those to halve its headline rate in 18 months.
If your town centre is like that I’d love to swap notes about the approach you’re taking to getting those empty units back in play and improving the mix of uses.
Do let me know…
