Our Town Stories: Conversations
Reimagining the Town Centre: a conversation between Crewe and Newhaven
Our Town Stories Conversations brings together Towns to discuss a shared topic at the heart of their Towns Fund experience.
In our first Conversation, Simon Yates, Vice Chair of the Crewe Town Deal Board and Peter Sharp, Head of Regeneration for Lewes and Eastbourne Councils discuss their experiences of bringing together their Town Deal and Future High Streets Fund to work for each of their Towns.
Long read ~15mins
Simon Yates (Simon), Crewe:
I'm the Vice Chair of the Crewe Town Deal Board. We received our Town Deal offer in July 2021. I've lived or worked in Crewe since 1990. I was in healthcare management and ran the hospital in the town. When I retired a number of years ago, I got involved in local politics. I was Leader of the town council in Crewe. One of the big things that really interested me at the time was economic regeneration.
The collapse of the railway works around which the town had been built since the 1830s and 40s, meant there was a hollowing out of the town centre and a massive shift if you like in skills, income and demography in the town.
Peter Sharp (Peter), Newhaven:
Newhaven is a small town on the south coast and has many of the same challenges that Simon has highlighted in Crewe, particularly around the decline of the port.
My team's remit is around economic development and regeneration, and we lead on different grant funding bids across the Lewes and Eastbourne council areas. We were successful in getting the Future High Streets funding, and we also had our Town Deal offer in the last announcement in July.
The reason we’ve had the focus for funding is because a lot of the towns around us are really affluent. Newhaven is almost the town that time forgot. It feels like there's a lot of similarities between Crewe and Newhaven, even though we're in different parts of the country.
Our Town Stories: What is your vision for a high street or town centre fit for the future, and can you describe the strategic themes across both Future High Streets Fund and your Town Deal?
Peter:
We have been through a process of reimagining Newhaven town centre. The coast road that runs through Newhaven, built in the 1970s, was created as a one-way system which encircled the town centre. It literally cut the town centre off from the surrounding residential and employment areas. It has become an unpleasant environment, so nobody wants to go there anymore. Our vision is to reimagine it as a focus for community life and we linked the strategic themes of the Future High Streets Fund and the Town Deal together to help us realise this vision.
It’s all been underpinned by some engagement we undertook in 2018 and 2019. We have an Enterprise Zone in Newhaven, and as part of that we developed something we call the Newhaven Story. We spoke to a wide range of stakeholders, held workshops with community groups and others, and asked, “What do you see as Newhaven’s assets, what are our challenges?”
That created three distinctive pillars, or themes which were: Valuing creative freedom, Marine in the making and Celebrating the energy of industry. We’ve tried to build upon valuing creative freedom in the high street plans. We have a multi-purpose event space and creative hub - we’ve got a very strong local creative sector that we're trying to support and grow.
Simon:
Crewe sits as the largest settlement in quite a wealthy area of the northwest of England. Yet it has a poor record of public health issues, family income levels and housing conditions. There has been low educational attainment by secondary school age children within Crewe. This has faced some cynicism and scepticism within the town about what could be done.
For people who live outside the town centre - and that population has been growing in the last 20 years - there is a mixture of disdain, contempt and indifference to Crewe.
Our vision is for a town centre that is attractive to people who live in the town, while also appealing to people who live outside. We have to appeal to people with little money or buying power as well as those who have the wealth to spend in the town. That's been quite a difficult match. It's been a difficult message politically, trying to bring all these ideas together, but in the end, it's very similar to Peter's story.
A jewel in the crown for Crewe, the Lyceum Theatre, has been central to a lot of the things that we've done, as have other places that are part of Crewe’s industrial heritage. What we're trying to do is make sure that the Town Deal projects are complementary to the projects that had already been identified in the Future High Streets Fund.
The town centre is defined by the railway lines in Crewe, which split the town. Peter was talking about the ring road, well the railways do that job in Crewe. What it means is that you can have quite small areas of the town which are physically, culturally and sociologically divided by the railways. How do you pull those together?
The retail envelope is far too large at the moment. There's an incredibly successful, just out of centre retail park. There's a great big railway and a bridge that goes between that and the civic part of the town. But it might as well be 20 miles apart in terms of getting people to cross over.
As for strategic themes across the two funds, culture is the first thing. There’s been quite an interesting debate about whether the people of Crewe are interested in culture. Peter was talking about the successful cultural development in Newhaven and it’s very similar for Crewe.
It's amazing that the only community groups of any size that had created a strategy for the town are culture-focused groups. What we've done is to use the power they have created over a number of years to try and get others to adopt a similar sort of approach. Because when we got into the process we found there's lots of ideas, but very little had been worked up, in terms of schemes and projects.
Culture, industrial heritage, restoring a sense of community pride. Those are the big themes that we tried to focus on.
Our Town Stories: You've both already started to touch on this. What do you see as the core challenges to a thriving high street and town centre?
Peter:
One of the challenges we've faced is that a lot of the regeneration has come before Future High Streets Fund and Towns Fund. Whilst it's been beneficial for Newhaven as a whole, sometimes the community doesn't feel that it talks to them.
In our Town Investment Plan (TIP), we identified the challenge of how to create what we called a social return on investment. How do we give that positive community aspect to our projects and to the investment?
We have the Enterprise Zone which is great. It has created jobs and attracted investment. But because of the low skills in the town, it hasn't yet created jobs for local people, so this is something we’re working on. At the moment people from the surrounding affluent areas are commuting into work and then leaving again without spending money.
At the end of 2019, just before Covid, our street fronting retail vacancy rate in Newhaven Town Centre was 19.8%, double the national average at that time. The rate had more than doubled in a decade in Newhaven. A survey we did found that around half of visitors to the town centre stayed less than one hour. The town centre is being used as a convenience location, not a destination in its own right. Something like 47% spent less than £10 in a visit.
We’ve had to think about new uses and reimagine the high street to bring in footfall. We are trying to bring in more events and activity into the town centre and have been making empty buildings available for meanwhile use. One short-term meanwhile lease was provided to a Vets, which has brought in significant footfall. We have started to see some initial benefits from that.
Simon:
I think one of our challenges has been around community engagement and giving the people in the town the idea that something can be done and change is on the horizon. You have to do it with little steps. Gradually, we are making that happen. Social media has the knockers being knocked and we've got to keep the pace up.
Our Town Stories: In what ways have Future High Streets Fund and your Town Deal enabled you to develop long term strategies for your high streets and town centres and why is this important?
Simon:
That’s a really interesting point. One of the things I find quite difficult is navigating how the funding works. The context if you like, around the Town Deal, which is very different from anything else.
The Future High Streets Fund was happening before the Town Deal came along and the only people involved in it was the local authority. Our Town Deal creates a completely different model of doing things, and actually, if you don't want to tie the two things together, you don't have to. Fortunately I think we've been able to develop something which is complementary. But, you've got these different models, or vehicles of doing things and the great danger is if you're not careful you create different silos, you don't provide the opportunity for stuff to move across.
What we've tried to show through our TIP, is the importance of vision and strategy. Because unless you've got that, you end up jumping like Pavlov's dog to the pots of money when they're offered out without having the sense of how you create something bigger than just the sum of the parts.
We've already decided that as we go through this next year around the business case for the Town Deal that we've got to be pretty clear about making sure that any other pots of money that appear play into the same vision.
Peter:
Simon's absolutely right, that challenge of constantly chasing money is problematic. But having done the Newhaven Story, and the engagement we started with the Enterprise Zone, that gave us this strategic overview if you like.
That was the basis for all of the strategic visions, across all of the bids, and that includes the Leveling Up Fund submission that we put in recently. That's been how we've linked things together. But it is a challenge where you have competitive funding pots, and particularly for myself as a council employee. It's not just about Newhaven. We're not a town council, we're a district council. We get criticism about a disproportionate focus on Newhaven, despite the fact it has the biggest structural economic challenges.
Our Town Stories: In what ways have you been able to engage and support local leadership around a shared strategy?
Peter:
Some of that started with the designation of the Enterprise Zone. We created a strategic board to involve local business leaders, community leaders and senior management from our local authorities.
All of those groups were already on board with the same principles and then it was a case of getting the politicians on board as part of the Future High Streets Fund and Town Deal journey. Certainly initially, we had some challenges with our Future High Streets bid because it was focused on the non-traditional, creative and cultural sectors. I think our mistake initially was that we hadn't done enough to really highlight the burgeoning growth within that sector locally. We rectified it quite quickly by really highlighting the number of local people involved in the sector.
Certainly developing the TIP at quite a granular level has helped with local leadership because it's really got them involved in what's going on. Taking them through for example how the Green Book works, was an opportunity to educate our local leaders and others.
We can't just talk about a wish list, you've got to have deliverable projects to make this work. If we haven't, then we can look at developing them, but they're not going to be ready now. They may be ready for future funding bids.
Simon:
It's really been quite an interesting exercise from a political point of view in Crewe. From very early on there was quite a difficult position, in terms of getting the Town Deal Board established and understanding what the relationship would be between the Town Deal Board and the local authority.
We struggled to find a way of dealing with the divides that were there. How do you create a successful organisation when you've got people from the business community who don’t want to get involved in the political side of things?
And the political divides between the MP and the Leader of the town council. It's been a massive thing to do.
I think it's demonstrated that actually if you create a model, which brings people together where you are not necessarily forcing people into the sort of the open political standpoints that normally have to be adopted, then you can find a way through.
The opportunity to have a Town Deal Board like this has demonstrated that in a large local authority, you need to have something that focuses specifically on the needs of particular areas within the boundaries of a large local authority. Otherwise everything gets mixed up. If you don't get down to the granular level of the importance of the specific needs of local communities, then you don't analyse and get to the bottom of it enough to get the right solutions.
Our Town Stories: What advice would you give to other towns that want to make the most of the public funding available, attract private investment with the aim of creating high streets that are thriving, sustainable and fit for the 21st century?
Peter:
Every town in the country wants to do that. I think the most important thing for me has been making sure that at a very early stage you're engaging with your communities, but making it clear that you don't have all the answers, and actually saying, “Well, what do you want?”, and then challenging them. So that engagement was critical.
I think the challenge though, alongside that, was that we slightly fell into the trap of engaging with the people that wanted to engage, and not reaching the most deprived sections of the community who didn't feel the council had anything useful to offer them. This is something that we are still working to address.
Once we understood what our businesses wanted, and understood what the key community groups wanted, that really steered us in a certain direction. We created seven different programmes centred around what the engagement told us.
We really try to focus on showing how the engagement we've undertaken with the community genuinely informs our plans and wasn't just paying lip service.
That was really important for us, that's probably the key thing I'd say.
Simon
The biggest gap for us was quite a poor response from the business community when we went out and asked for ideas and proposals. This was a real surprise because the Chamber of Commerce is strong locally and up until Covid, business had been strong in Crewe. Yeah, we've got some big players, a lot of engineering firms and railway-based activities, but there was very little comment about what they were looking for. What we did was to go further afield. We talked to prospective businesses about what it is that makes an area attractive to them if an employer wants to recruit people to come and live in a particular area.
We've got things like HS2 to come which is already making a big difference in terms of land availability and outside investment. Even so, anybody moving their business into an area like Crewe would need to demonstrate to the people who work for them that it's a place that they would want to go to, which is why we've put so much effort into trying to work what makes an area attractive for people to come and live and work.
The issue has to be, how do you use the investment of public money, not as a subsidy for private investment, but to create the environment, which enables private investment. In the end, public sector bodies alone are never going to have enough in order to bring about the changes that are needed in the town but they really can be the catalyst. And I guess that's the way we've gone about it.
Our Town Stories: What do you hope the experience of your high street will be in say five years from now? Do you have any final thoughts to share?
Peter:
For me, I would hope that Newhaven’s high street becomes a destination in its own right, rather than for popping into town for a loaf of bread or pint of milk. It offers something that really becomes the focal point for community life, something that we haven't had for probably 30 or 40 years. I think we will see significant private investment over the coming years, but it's very hard to calculate exactly how much at the moment. If what we are doing comes off in the way we envisage, it becomes a destination again, it will attract people in but not necessarily for retail. It will be a multifunctional community hub, if you like, as a whole town centre.
Simon:
We are thinking of something very similar really. The town centre’s no longer going to be about retail. It is going to be about a whole range of different experiences, which will be retail, leisure, but also culture and heritage activities. Event spaces, people coming together. With the new uses of the market, we can already see families meeting together, people bumping into each other again. People want to be able to engage with one another again.
Our Town Stories: Thank you!
This conversation was held on 16 August 2021 between Simon Yates, Chair of Crewe Town Deal Board and Peter Sharp, Head of Regeneration for Lewes and Eastbourne Councils and hosted by Our Town Stories.
Crewe and Newhaven are two of 101 places with Town Deal offers of investment from the government to develop and deliver projects that support long-term economic recovery, regeneration, clean growth, jobs and prosperity for their Towns. The 101 Town Deals are worth more than £2.4 billion in total and are part of the £3.6bn Towns Fund. Crewe and Newhaven were also two of 72 places that were successful in bidding for the £830m Future High Streets Fund, also part of the Towns Fund.
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