Reimagination

The future of your town centre

What does the future look like?

If town centres are to remain at the heart of our communities they need to find new relevance. For this to occur, we are helping clients:

Repurpose spaces and properties to include a wider range of uses such as flexible workspaces, healthcare facilities, education and residential, providing a new draw for visitors and expanded catchment.
Re-use existing premises or make use of lower-cost temporary buildings. This can be a good way of testing the market and organically growing demand, creating a ready-made market for space that is delivered through future development on key sites.
Launch immediate interventions through reopening, which can also play a role as a ‘live testbed’ for more permanent change, enabling real time testing of new ways of operating and providing live data on what does/doesn’t support town centre health. As such they can provide an intelligence base to inform future decision making on how our centres should be structured.

How to help retail?

The integration of technology and data will be critical for retailers, enabling increased personalisation and tailoring of product lines at both the individual and local level and allowing faster stock turnover and agile adaptation to respond to micro-trends.

Landlords will need to address fast-changing needs and provide more flexible spaces so that businesses can test trade.
New leasing models and ‘white box’ retail space with enhanced fit-out can lower barriers to entry and encourage experimentation with space.
A hybrid approach could be key to the high street’s long-term survival. Blending a high-quality online and in-store presence could ensure that businesses survive any future lockdowns and help independent retailers to reach wider audiences than ever before.

How do we deliver this?

The process of reanimation and adaptive reuse should ultimately deliver real benefits for developers, investors, the community and the environment, by re-using buildings productively and evolving the distinctiveness of their surroundings.

Town centres bring together a wide range of stakeholders, each has different needs and motivations. To deliver successful places we must understand these and respond directly to them – shaping approaches that blend economic, financial and social outcomes and therefore offer a tangible benefit for all.
New partnerships can be formed that can both reimagine how existing buildings are used but also affect more fundamental reshaping of the urban environment, creating the context and assets to boost town centre health.

Click on the map below to explore the considerations that should be made in the immediate, medium and long term as we look to reopen, reanimate and reimagine our UK towns:

Our conversations so far...

Shaping successful town centres for the future

For many already challenged town centres there is now more than ever a clear need to do something different. Creating town centres that work for everyone and that put communities back at their heart will have a hugely positive social impact, creating a place where people want to be; to work, to live, to experience, to enjoy and to play. View our recent webinar on shaping succesful town centres for the future.

Watch the replay

The evolution of our Town Centres

Martyn Saunders, Planning development and regneration, Avison Young

Town centres have faced substantial challenges long before the arrival of Covid-19. Major retailers and smaller shops alike have been disappearing from our high streets, many of which are used as much as transport corridors as they are destinations for shopping or leisure. For several years, there has been talk of how town centres need to be reimaged, but the pandemic has made the need for action critical.

Resillience in the Industrial market -the shifting course of data and technology application

Andrew Jackson, Industrial, Avison Young

Lockdowns around the globe have required consumers to turn to the internet for most, or all, of their shopping needs. This has sharply accelerated an already growing trend, increasing e-commerce demands from retailers in terms of logistics space.