The Vacant Shops Academy

How much is reducing the number of empty highstreet shops in your town centre featuring in your ‘Pride in Place’ programme planning…?

For sure, if you have more than say one in ten vacant, they’ll impact on resident and visitor perceptions of your place and those of the businesses you do have, especially if empty units are looking worse for wear. You may be getting negative media stories and certainly adverse comments on social media. And if your number tops a certain level it’s likely to worsen unless you get on the case.

But if you could halve your headline vacancy rate within the first two years of your ‘Pride in Place’ ten, you’d likely get a big uplift in how your town centre is seen…

…and that’s added to by attracting in retail or hospitality brands that are on people’s wish list, increasing the number of attractive independents and seeing ‘alternative’ / additional use types like the always popular arts & crafts, creative, community uses take up space.

The result…? Increased footfall and dwell time, extra investment and a positive momentum that helps further reduce vacancy.

Lots of reasons then to have reducing empty unit numbers and improving the mix of uses in those ‘Pride in Place’ submissions.

We’d love to talk to more local teams if you are putting your next phase programme together about how this approach can make a difference.

Do get in touch…

It’s been quite some week across places we’re working with on tackling highstreet vacancy.

And the list of updates shows a really important part of the story, that while the focus is on getting empty units back into play and improving the mix of uses, our ‘next steps’ suggestions for town and city centres moving forward is, sometimes as much as half, about what we call ‘look’ and wider placemaking things as well as vacancy itself.

That’s certainly the case with the top item in our week’s updates, given the impact wall art can have on ‘Pride in Place’, your town’s attractiveness and positivity in its social media groups.

The words in my opener are about the latest stunning addition to a towns-wide series by the team at Blaenau Gwent and the super-talented ‘Walls by Paul’.

Other updates include:

• an indie shop celebrating 3 years in Dunfermline chose the day to announce it’s opening another on Kirkcaldy High Street;
• the CreweCreates team behind its brilliant Platform gallery and community art space have announced a streetart festival;
• Poole is one of the locations to feature in Barclays very welcome announcement of new branches (with thanks to The Dolphin shopping centre for the image);
• an indie business that recently moved to a much bigger unit in Galashiels has revealed it’s planning to create an indoor market in part of the space;
• As reported earlier, two Forest of Dean towns – Cinderford & Coleford – have had the first encouraging meeting of their tackling vacancy-focused ‘place partnership’ groups.

It’d be great to hear upbeat updates from your town or city centre…

I so wish you could’ve been with us at the two ‘place partnership’ founding meetings we were lucky to co-host last week.

Now you might be thinking, that’s a bit niche…

… but if you’re an agent, landlord, business owner, lead a community group or cultural organisations, a council member or officer or head up a chamber or BID where there is one, in a town or city centre with too many empty units or only a few but ones that are proving tricky to get back in play, I’m certain you’ll find it’s time well spent.

In this case, two ninety-minute meetings in neighbour towns with different but connected vacancy challenges and you can quickly see why the concept at the heart of our approach works so well…

• Ideas and experiences shared
• Questions answered
• Understanding improved
• Connections made
• Solutions emerging.

It’s just so encouraging to see that happen and the sense build through the meeting that they will be able to make a difference…

…and that’s bearing in mind it was a first run, some of the partners know each other well, are working together already, but others had not met.

We’re already planning and looking forward to the next meetings when we’ll focus in on the town’s priority empty units and hopefully “get the keys” and go visit one or two of them.

If vacancy is an issue in your place and you’re not yet working together on it, as Cinderford and Coleford now are, do please get in touch. It’d be great talk you through…

Arts & crafts, creative, culture, community could play a much bigger part than they already do by taking on more empty units in our town and city centres.

It’s a case we regularly make in setting out potential ‘next steps’ for places we’re supporting with tackling highstreet vacancy.

It’s also something central to the approach we set out in Crewe town centre for reasons highlighted on a recent post here.

So could your town or city centre make them more of the mix you have…?

This post was sparked by my walk-see this week in Banbury town centre from where the image set was taken, because they have a number of examples of units taken on by businesses and organisations with creativity at their heart…

…and also because a similar question for a ‘place partnership’ there might be could more of your blank spaces feature wall art…?

I’d love to hear examples of these kinds of ventures getting established in empty units where you are from fellow places leaders and managers.

Do let me know…

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…

Super excited to be headed out & about on a series of visits to support local tackling highstreet vacancy teams…

First to begin work with two ‘place partnership’ groups as they get started on reducing the number of empty units and improving the mix of uses in their town centres, including planning their version of our ‘get the keys’ initiative;

Then a return visit to a town we’ve completed the initial ‘audit, engage’ stage to paint a clear picture of their vacancy challenge, to see what’s changed and meet some of those locally who’ve agreed to play a part in ‘next steps’;

And mid-next month to make a start on a new commission – the 47th location we’ve taken our tackling highstreet vacancy approach.

It’s one of the joys of the job to visit new places, to draw on our experiences and learning since 2013, to share our approach with local teams as they get on the case, and most of all to meet the brilliant individuals and organisations working to make their town or city centre the best it can be.

This visits set is an interesting trio because it highlights three key elements of our approach: identifying the vacant units and trying to work out why they’re like that, bringing together individuals and organisations who are keen to play a part in overcoming the barriers to getting those units back into play, and supporting ‘place partnership’ teams as they crack on.

If your place still has too many empty units and / or you have residents and existing businesses concerned that the mix of uses is changing and not in a positive way, especially if you’re thinking about deploying High Street Rental Auctions, we’d love to add you to our visits list for this autumn.

Do get in touch…!