Dr Fei Chen and Ms Sandy Britton, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool – Written evidence (HSC0008)

What should be included on high streets to meet the needs of the whole community?  

The UK’s high streets are facing significant challenges, particularly in small towns where town centres are rapidly declining with an increasing number of vacant units, shrinking public services and dilapidated infrastructure. These challenges are evidently presented in Huyton, a small town at the outskirt of Liverpool. In collaboration with the local council, our team, comprising 30 students and 4 tutors, was tasked with generating proposals for both temporary uses of spaces (‘meanwhile’ projects) and permanent interventions to the high street to assess needs and feasibilities. We intentionally encouraged innovative thinking from the students and a critical exploration of the high street's heritage, identity, current amenities, and the aspirations of the local community. We believe high street regeneration needs to be closely tied with these unique factors and cannot be over generalised. It is important to foster a sense of ownership within the local community for long-term resilience of the high street. Nevertheless, we’d like to share students’ out-of-the boxes thinking about what high street could become which may be inspirational for other towns and cities in the UK.

Our finding echoes the government’s policy paper to bring functional diversity into high streets. ‘Meanwhile’ projects could be encouraged as temporary solutions to current challenges, generators of specific activities, and tests of opportunities. Regarding permanent interventions, adaptive reuse should be prioritised over demolition for environmentally sustainable reasons. We recommend: first, design the high street for all age groups; second, high streets should provide basic services for residents such as shelter and toilet provisions, which should be free to use; third, accessible social and communal spaces are essential for fostering a sense of community; fourth, high streets should also be designed for visitors or outsiders to keep it dynamic and lively. The following explains these points.

Regarding design for whole life use, many high streets lack spaces for play, particularly catering to parents with young children who found themselves with limited options after school due to the closure of certain toy shops and indoor play areas following the pandemic. The appeal of sports facilities on the high street is particularly strong among young people, which is a sizable demographic in Huyton. But these facilities can be used by all ages. Students conducted experiments involving the repurposing of a 1960s multistorey car park, converting it into sports courts on the roof and incorporating small vending stores on other floors.

We explored housing options that repurposed some existing structures on the high streets to enable a 24-hour economy. This included live/work dwellings that maintained ground-level shopfronts with accommodations above. Additionally, we examined housing for individuals over 55, focusing on extra care and reinforcing the provision of accessible independent shops at the ground floor, complemented by living spaces above for the older population.

Second, in terms of basic services, public toilets and seating opportunities are typically limited on the high street, leading to unequal access for elderly individuals and others who rely on these facilities regularly. Students tested the effectiveness of pop-up toilets paired with seating and charging stations in our project on the high street. Dismountable structures and components, such as shipping containers, flatpack timbers, scaffolding, and tents, can be employed in constructing these installations. These materials demonstrate cost-effectiveness and provide swift responses to specific needs.

Cycling facilities were suggested to facilitate access for cyclists to high street areas. In most places, cycling has not been sufficiently supported, but it is essential for achieving the zero net carbon goal. To promote cycling, a dedicated lane (clearly defined with appropriate paving) and storage facilities on the high street are essential. Good connectivity achieved through a network of cycle lanes is also pivotal to ensure cyclists easy access to the wider region. One student's proposal ingeniously integrated cycle storage with demonstrative energy generation devices to enhance awareness of sustainable energy use on the high street, which seems to be plausible.

Third, community social and event spaces are normally well-received by residents. Like in Huyton, there is a collective appreciation for temporary pavilions dedicated to events, facilitating periodic gatherings such as local produce markets and pop-up libraries, health service stores. One student's proposal, titled 'Lively Sail', precisely met these needs and was successfully implemented by the council during the summer of 2022 on the high street, gaining popularity among the local residents.

Furthermore, our proposal included a community and council hub, offering vital support infrastructure and amenities. This encompassed shared rooftop gardens for growing, communal sewing machines, small workshops, and clothes swap stations, providing residents with self-run skill-building opportunities. These facilities are hugely important for supporting some disadvantaged groups in the community and help them building employment capacity. Libraries that integrate café, cinema and children’s space are often well used, for example, Chester’s Storyhouse is a good model. In Huyton, the cinema in an old building was changed its function in the last two decades. It was deeply missed by residents and restored in our proposal.

Fourth, high streets need to be attractive to visitors and outsiders who bring in fresh ideas and other social economic benefits. In the retrofit of housing project, we considered emergency housing for visitors designed as a welcoming space for short, medium, and long-term stays. Accessible event spaces mentioned above are also attractors for visitors.

Who is involved in ensuring a thriving local high street and does the current structure of Government support facilitate those groups in working together?

Although public engagement is a standard practice in urban regeneration in the UK nowadays, it is a real challenge to engage as many local people as possible whose participation is on a voluntary basis. In recent years of austerity, local councils have faced budget cuts affecting the public engagement fund, exacerbating the situation. Moreover, current development policies such as the Town and Country Planning Act, the National Planning Policy Framework in England, stipulate that public consultation or notification occurs when a planning application is submitted or nearing submission. This often proves too late for any meaningful public consultation to transpire, as only individuals significantly impacted by the development would engage at this stage. Consequently, this passive engagement approach restricts both the number and depth of public involvement.

In our Huyton Valued project, we implemented a pilot initiative that combined creative methods with traditional approaches to engage the broad community, thereby addressing the limitations of specific engagement tools. For instance, relying solely on digital tools may exclude individuals unfamiliar with ICTs or those who cannot afford suitable devices. Social media engagement is restricted to those who use the platform and happen to come across the information. Similarly, traditional face-to-face methods can foster meaningful engagement but require considerable time and resources. Holding events at specific times and locations means that only the population present at those instances would be engaged.

Many towns and high street regeneration are facing the challenges of engaging with young people, as observed in Huyton. We then devised a digital model of the town centre, serving as a digital twin of the town. This model allows users to navigate and explore the virtual environment, simulating a gaming experience. The model has a 1960s and a 1990s version of the town, and users can seamlessly switch between these historical renditions and the contemporary town. In 2023, we collaborated with our community partners to organize three one-day workshops at different locations, catering to diverse groups to maximise engagement. These workshops took place in a social housing setting, on the high street, and in a Community Centre.

As participants immersed themselves in the digital twin, reconnecting with both the historical and contemporary physical environments, they were invited to share their memories, stories, and aspirations for specific spaces within the town. Subsequently, we incorporated this valuable information into the corresponding locations within the digital twin, which was later made accessible online for the wider community. With approximately 100 memories and stories collected, a substantial database was formed. This database has the potential for expansion and enrichment through future public engagement events, fostering an ongoing and dynamic resource. The wealth of community perspectives on the town and high street can then be considered and debated in the urban regeneration process (access the database here). This form of engagement is detached from the time constraints of a specific project, presenting the opportunity for continuous involvement with the wider community as the high street undergoes further changes and adaptations.

About us

Dr Chen is a Reader in Liverpool School of Architecture (LSA). She has been working on liveable streets and high streets regeneration in the past decade. Sandy Britton is a Senior Lecturer in LSA. She led the Pen&Inc design studio in the Architecture programme. Since 2021, Sandy and Fei began to collaborate with the local council and an architectural practice, working on the regeneration of Huyton’s high street. This collaboration and its outcome were documented in the report, Ideas for Huyton Village: An Exploration of Collaborative High Street Design; published in the Journal Charrette Ideas for Huyton: Education through Collaboration. In 2023, they completed a Research England funded public engagement project, Huyton Valued, which employed mixed participatory methods to understand Huyton residents’ sense of place. This response is prepared based on the above-mentioned research.

The authors thank Thomas Arnold at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool for his constructive feedback on the draft of the response.

18 March 2024