Covid-19’s impact on town centres

Adapting town centres post Covid-19

A London borough commissioned a project to identify the success factors in reopening and adapting town centres during Covid-19 to consider how their draft framework may need to change.

Brief

To apply knowledge and experience gained pre-pandemic and to analyse research reports and data on Covid-19 to identify the success factors in reopening and adapting town centres.

The project would:

• Build a picture of the situation during and post Covid-19 restrictions
• Analyse data from High Street Task Force, Centre for London, Centre for Cities and other sources in the context of the town centre
• Understand the role of key stakeholders
• Educate stakeholders on how they could deliver change
• Consider if any adaptions were needed to the town centre draft framework

Results

The resulting report and action plan enabled the council to:

• Identify interventions they could make in the short term to support local businesses
• Map out long-term objectives by creating employment and workspaces (via empty units/assets that the council owned)
• Ensure that the town centre remained easy to access and that residents were able to move around safely as lockdown eased
• Provided recommendations that focused on changes that could also be applied to the existing town centre framework in light of the pandemic