Community-led High Street Innovators
We’re collaborating with a small number of community businesses to test and learn how community-led high street regeneration projects can be a model for communities everywhere.
Testing solutions for community-led high street renewal
Our Community-Led High Street Innovators project tests how community-led action can revitalise high streets and town centres across England.
The project supports community businesses to develop their work on the high street, using community-led approaches to regenerate their local places. It focuses on communities taking space on high streets and increasing their role in decision-making about their local high street or town centre.
Meet the innovators
Artspace Lifespace
Location: Bristol
Dewsbury Arcade Group
Location: Dewsbury
MadLab
Location: Stockport
Make LCR
Location: Birkenhead
Southmead Development Trust
Location: Bristol
Shaping high streets policy
To strengthen this emerging evidence, our High Street Policy Reference Group brought together a network of policymakers and influencers, funders and experts to explore complex issues of high street and town centre regeneration and promoting community-led development. The group members shared best practice and research, develop policy ideas and recommendations, and contributing to the emerging evidence from the Community-Led High Street Innovators.
Discoveries
Over 12 months, Community-Led High Street Innovators explored different approaches for increasing community involvement in the renewal of their high streets. This included creating coalitions of community organisations to speak more effectively for the community, testing new policy powers like High Street Rental Auctions, and exploring alternative approaches to cultural placemaking to avoid extractive town centre regeneration.
We used an evidence-gathering framework to understand the barriers communities face in high street regeneration. We found the civic high street to be the right organising principle for the shift toward mixed-use, community-centred high streets – places for care, learning, enterprise, culture, connection and everyday participation.
Our report ‘The new high street playbook’ surfaces practical lessons on space, governance, finance and stewardship, showing that stronger community roles in shaping, ownership and stewardship are essential for transforming our high streets and town centres.
Resources
Resources created by our Innovators as part of the project can support other communities to access space:
- If you’ve got an idea about how to bring a vacant space back into use but need to gain access to the space, you can use Make CIC’s community assets diagnostic to explore routes to access.
- If you have agreed access to a vacant space (or if you are a landlord who wants to unlock the potential of a vacant building), use Artspace Lifespace’s Vacant Property Toolkit as a practical step-by-step guide to taking on a vacant space.
In the coming months, we’re developing a practical toolkit for communities and local partners. Sign up to be the first to receive it.
Get inspired
Stories from communities breathing life back into places.
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