Design Council – Written evidence (HSC0043)

Introduction

About the Design Council

The Design Council is the UK’s national strategic advisor for design, championing design and its ability to make life better for all. We are an independent and not for profit organisation incorporated by Royal Charter. The Design Council uniquely works across all design sectors and delivers programmes with business, government, public bodies and the third sector. Our Design for Planet mission was introduced in 2021 to galvanise and support the 1.97 million people who work in the UK’s design economy to help achieve net zero and beyond. The design economy contributes 4.9% of UK GVA, growing at twice the rate of the economy overall.

The Design Council’s response draws from our extensive work with high streets and town centres. As part of the High Streets Task Force partnership, we support local leaders to use design to breathe new life into high streets and town centres and adapt to the challenges of changing consumer habits. Additionally, we have supported several community groups to develop initiatives that revive their high streets through our Design, Differently programme;[1] supported 25 DLUHC Design Code Pathfinders to produce design codes including codes for high street areas; delivered over a thousand Design Reviews[2] for Local Authorities since 2011, including high street based projects and town masterplans; and supported large infrastructure providers like Network Rail through ThinkStation[3] and ExploreStation[4] which developed the rail network’s connection to the town centre.

Summary: Why design matters for high streets

Our key message: Design is the key discipline needed to establish the role, function, identity and aspiration of a town centre high street. This will be unique to each place. And establishing a shared vision involves serious conversations politically and across the diversity of local communities and businesses. Design is the tool to help form this shared vision and it is the capability that will help shape a desirable place. Until a shared vision can be recognised and articulated, local leaders will always be stuck in a cycle of chasing piecemeal, isolated and incremental ‘improvements’ to the high street that do not cumulatively halt or reverse its decline. Using design as a tool in high street adaptation can target truly transformative renewal.

High streets. Our high streets and town centres are at the heart of local economies and communities, creating spaces of activity, vitality, and life. However, their role is changing – influenced by changing consumer habits and patterns of work and life after the Covid19 pandemic. Policymakers and place shapers must transition high streets beyond a singular focus on retail, and instead repurpose spaces for local people to come together, build unique place identity, connect with their surroundings, and nurture local economies. By 'place’ we mean not just the built environment which frames daily interactions, but the physical, green and social infrastructure that supports communities, and the emotional investment said communities make into the environment, thereby enabling these elements to come together in a coherent whole.

The role of design. Design plays an important role in developing contextual, high quality, sustainable and vibrant high streets fit for the 21st century, inspiring aspirational and creative outcomes which manifest as desirable places. Design considers physical, social, cultural, environmental, and economic factors – as well as the character of the existing built environment – to plan and deliver functional and visually appealing solutions that can last for generations to come. Our research shows that when place-shapers use design mindsets and skills they add greater value to high streets and high street renewal schemes.[5]

How design can support high street renewal:

1.      Design as a process: Place Visioning and co-design. Design can help to identify, articulate and then deliver suitable spatial and systemic responses to high street renewal. A Place Vision is a galvanising resource that describes the future aspirations for a specific location. It captures the place’s values, represents local people’s aspirations, and outlines what the place may be in the longer term; its identity, purpose, role, function, economic model, and relationship with its communities and surroundings. It helps decision-makers allocation resources, creates accountability and establishes shared understandings of what success looks like for the place. Our work shows taking a design-led approach to visioning – taking an iterative, human-centred approach from the earliest stage – enables a more effective public vision to be created with greater community buy-in.[6] However, there is currently a lack of clear purpose to high street plans which could be rectified by a design-led approach.

2.      Design as an outcome: Built environment quality. Design-led approaches put people at the centre of planning. Better designed buildings and urban environments improve the citizen experience of places, making more attractive and inclusive environments. Our research shows that the higher the quality of the physical fabric of the high street, the more time and money people will spend in the area.[7]

3.      Design for planet: Environmental resilience. Well-designed high streets can play an important role in building local communities’ resilience to the climate crisis – alongside other economic and social challenges – particularly if they are designed in a more equitable way. 80% of environmental impacts are determined at design stage, therefore design pays an important role in the green transition.[8] Design can also support on the re-purposing of existing assets to new uses, thereby supporting the considered reinvigoration of high streets.

4.      Design for Economic Diversity. To be sucessful today, a town’s high street cannot rely on retail alone. But to establish an alternative, and bring in the right portfolio of diverse uses, a vision of the place that leaders are trying to make must be clearly established.  Having a clear high street vision ensures that the right diversity of uses can be encouraged to come to the area, building economic diversity and resilience.

How to harness design to revive our high streets: To harness the potential of design for high street adaptation and renewal we recommend:

1.                                                     Prioritise design quality in planning and development policies. Creating planning policies, strategic spatial plans, and design codes that clearly articulate what good design means in their context, and demand that it is delivered. Crucially, good design is always green design.
2.                                                     Upskill built environment decision makers in design. Enabling planners, local leaders, place shapers to use design thinking and co-design approaches to improve the methods and strategic processes through which our places are visioned, consulted on, and shaped.

High Streets in Towns and Small Cities

Question 1 – How do you define a high street in a town or small city and what is its purpose? 

The Design Council defines the high street as a central area of a town or city which acts as a centre for commerce, community, and employment alongside facilities for day-to-day life. It usually contains the highest concentration of shops, banks, cafes, restaurants, libraries and other businesses and services within the town or small city. It is not necessarily one road within the town, but often a network of roads with a convening of transport nodes which makes up the core of the town or city centre.

Question 4 – Who is involved in ensuring a thriving local high street and does the current structure of Government support facilitate those groups in working together? 

Everyone in a community – from retailers to transport operators to citizens themselves – is involved in ensuring a thriving local high street. Often these stakeholders will have different priorities, viewpoints and constraints which can mean creating a shared vision and agenda for high street renewal is challenging.

Value of co-design. Co-design approaches like the ones championed by the Design Council enable diverse groups to be involved in developing their local high streets. Co-design is a collaborative design process where stakeholders share their different perspectives, working constructively together to create forward-looking solutions to complex challenges. Local government has a central role in facilitating the co-design of high street inventions, bringing in communities, business, and other perspectives when they are most valuable. Co-creation sessions must be well-designed to be efficient, and design thinking can help structure them to suit community needs.

Co-design in the High Street Taskforce. Many of the high streets we have worked with as part of the High Streets Taskforce share a common barrier to regeneration: a lack of cohesion in the ideas and strategies of various stakeholders. Design thinking can help leaders articulate, visualise and synthesise those strategies to support better visioning. In Morecambe, for example, the town needed to create a shared strategy to harness the opportunities presented by the upcoming Eden Project Morecambe. The Design Council led place teams in adopting a design-lead approach to foster effective place leadership, trust, and stakeholder engagement. Through a collaborative workshop, teams began by assessed their existing assets and challenges, then created strategies to build ‘place pillars’ with corresponding plans for short, medium and long term solutions. Follow up sessions coached teams through visioning next steps and stakeholder engagement. Each team left with a unique summary report, supporting them to reach the best outcomes for the area.

About Design Codes. In a different example, The Design Council has been commissioned by DLUHC to support the ‘Pathfinder’ cohort of design coding teams. Design codes are a set of simple, concise, illustrated design requirements that provide specific, detailed parameters for the physical development of an area. They are created by local planning teams in collaboration with local communities and other stakeholders, aiming to articulate a shared vision of design quality for an area. By creating clearer and more transparent guidelines, they aim to improve the speed of the planning system, value of community engagement, and quality of place design.

Design codes and co-design. Community engagement is the ongoing core of the design coding process. In one example, Teinbridge District Council created a citizen panel that met five times for a thematic co-design workshop. They used creative activities like visioning exercises, creative writing and site visits to co-create a ’letter for the future’ establishing the vision for the area, which is translated into three spatial principles for the code (creation of place, people and nature first, and invested community). In another example, Finsbury Park and Stroud Green Neighbourhood Forum and Imagine Places held a full day, open, on-street design day, inviting the resident and business community, councillors, landowners and officers to explore design coding options, aided by 3D models on development visions for each site and the area overall.[9] The Design Council ‘Conversations and Insights’ has practical do’s and don’t for community engagement in coding.[10]

Question 5 – What role does the planning process have in determining the success or failure of the high street locally and is it fully able to address the challenges high streets face?

The role of the planning system. The planning process has an important impact on high streets. Strategic spatial plans, town centre masterplans, and town centre design codes, prepared by local authorities and communities, have a key role to play in determining the success of the high street as they take a holistic design-led approach to development, economic regeneration, and infrastructure planning. For example, the Greater Manchester Combined Authorities’ strategic spatial plan sets out a long-term approach to town centre evolution.[11] Similarly, the London Borough of Harringay’s high street plan – created with support from the High Street Task Force – takes a long-term approach to the evolution of their town centre, integrating a 2,000 year-old Roman roads with the demands and expectations of the 21st century.

Design Codes for town centres. Design Codes can play a key role in supporting successful place shaping in high streets and town centres. As they operate between the level of policy and planning application, design codes set clear expectations and can be meaningfully consulted on with local residents. Six of the 27 councils participating in the Design Code Pathfinders programme (by DLUHC and led by the Design Council and the Office for Place) developed codes for their town centres.[12] For example, Medway Council developed a code specifically for Chatham town centre to regenerate the historic waterfront town centre including industrial areas, high street, and historic residential suburbs. A specific vision was created for each area type (high street vs. residential, for example) based on local street characteristics and the design code was written to address movement, public space, nature, built form, and land use.[13] In another example, Finsbury Park and Stroud Green Neighbourhood Forum and ImaginePlaces created a code for Finsbury Park Station Quarter ensuring it is fit for 21st century civic life with excellent facilities, services and sociable spaces for residents, businesses and visitors of all means, ages and abilities. Design codes demonstrate a promising planning process for shaping the success of the high street.

The efficacy of the planning system. Strategic plans and design codes are effective economic and social levers that are relatively inexpensive to pull. However, Local Authorities often struggle to use local plans proactively and effectively. Local Authorities have powers in their local plans to create more place-specific requirements, but these need significant resources and expertise, which has been largely lost from Local Planning Authorities (LPA). And LPAs’ duties to consult their residents outside of the design coding process, emphasise the strategic level of planning which many people find difficult to understand or engage with. The result is that local opposition to schemes emerge at the planning application stage when schemes suddenly become ‘real’ for the first time. Additionally, the discretionary nature of the planning system also means that policy compliance often ends up in a ‘horse-trading’ negotiation, exploited by the biggest and most well-resourced developers. The government could do more to support LPAs to effectively develop strategic plans, including building in-house design capabilities, offering ‘bridging’ external strategic design support, and reviewing opportunities for planning reform strengthening local authorities’ powers and quality of community engagement.

Question 6 – What has been the impact of national level planning policies regarding high streets in the last five years and are any changes required?  

Design Code implementation. Local Design Codes are only just starting to be implemented by local authorities. Therefore, it is too early to understand the impact of Codes on high streets. However, insights from the Pathfinder cohort demonstrated the need to: raise the profile of design codes within national planning guidance to ensure they are understood and implemented well; establish a clearer hierarchy for planning objectives, weighted towards climate outcomes; and support the skills development of local planners.

National Model Design Code development. There is potential to extend the power and efficacy of design codes. If Design Codes went beyond physical form and set requirements for the use and performance of places, Design Codes could better drive quality, speed and sustainability through the planning system. The National Model Design Code (NMDC) focuses mainly on the physical form of buildings, but touches briefly on the use of buildings and spaces, and their environmental and social performance. The NMDC could be expanded to include coding patterns for sustainable use, services and environmental performance, to fill a critical gap in policy in a locally-specific, efficient way. This could support the sustainability and success of high streets.

Question 7 – What should be done to ensure that high streets being redeveloped now are structurally and financially resilient for future societal changes? 

Environmental resilience. The inherent link between the structural and financial resilience of high streets and their climate resilience is increasingly visible. This applies to both the resilience of the physical fabric of the high street, and the facilities they provide to support community resilience. With extreme weather events becoming increasingly common, flooding and extreme heat events threaten the future resilience of high streets. Potential environmental damages are likely to have a social as well as economic cost.

Creating environmentally resilient places. A design-led approach to high street renewal supports equitable approaches that consider holistic resilience help build readiness for future changes. Thorny challenges can be approached through use of design in specific ways on high streets, including to reducing pollution (through schemes such as pedestrianisation of the high street, or increasing use of public and active travel), repurposing of existing buildings (this retains built heritage and minimises disruption of embodied carbon whilst ensuring they are more fuel efficient), production of green energy locally (such as use of PV panels) and designing environments function in a different way (for example porous ground covering, and providing shade through provision of natural assets and street greening). For example, in Melbourne significant greening of the city centred has hugely increased its desirability for businesses and residents while also providing substantial environmental benefits.[14]

Creating diverse high street economies. Diverse high street uses is key to future resilience. The Design Council’s Design, Differently programme found that local communities supported communities moving away from a focus on retail, to include skills, culture and community facilities. The teams used our Double Diamond framework to define develop and deliver new, regenerative community services.[15] For example, The Village, based in London, are exploring the community centre of the future, informed by the need for communities to develop resilient climate knowledge and skills.[16] The Bristol Rainforest project is exploring incorporating food growing onto build facades to educate the community on food production.[17] We have also worked with several’ libraries of things’ groups (and their Welsh counterparts Benthyg Cymru) who are developing centralised places for community sharing of tools on the high street. In other places, the Really Local Group is re-purposing unused commercial spaces to create vibrant community assets.[18] Creative approaches such as these reinvigorate high streets through provision of new and emerging types of services and experiences that are required for the green transition.

Question 8 – How can spatial planning, street design and layout help to drive greater footfall to high streets? 

Street design. Design Council/CABE research ‘Paved with Gold’ demonstrates the clear financial benefits can be calculated from investing in better quality street design.[19] Where street design is higher quality, more pedestrians use the high street, for a longer average time, which correlates with a higher average spend. Our analysis found that the key features of a quality street include: dropped kerbs; tactile paving and colour contrast; smooth, clean, well-drained surfaces; high standards of maintenance; pavements wide enough to accommodate all users; no pinch points or obstructions; enough crossing points, in the right places; traffic levels not excessive; good lighting; sense of security; signage, landmarks and good sightlines; and public spaces along the street.[20]

Question 9 – Has the High Streets Taskforce been effective in providing support and expertise in high street recovery and what should this look like in the future?

The High Streets Task Force has effectively supported towns to seize opportunities around their high streets by providing specialised support such as town centre visioning. As such, the task force played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenge it posed for the high street. However, it is vital to acknowledge broader structural issues facing Local Authorities, which require solutions beyond the Task Force's scope. Future programmes should offer broad support to address systemic root causes affecting high streets and local authorities. That includes addressing challenges related to resourcing, skills, and funding.

The Design Council’s work as part of the High Streets Task Force has:

     Encouraged shared visioning along 45 high streets.

     Brought together towns to share learnings on how to tackle similar challenges through the Developing a Shared Vision cohort-based workshops.

     Inspired implementation of new and creative approaches to high street activation, such as Horncastle’s Teenage Market.

Question 10 – How can transport connectivity be improved to facilitate better access to high streets and town centres and how should this be funded? 

Railway stations. The Design Council’s work with Network Rail on station design ThinkStation and ExploreStation demonstrates the potential of railway stations to support highs street renewal. The current design of stations is typically inward facing, often complicated by railway lines, harsh fencing and gates that can sever the station from its surroundings. Passenger hubs should be a continuation of the public realm, town centre and/or high street, promoting permeability, forging strong connections and creating new relationships with the existing landscape and built environment. The principle of connecting communities instead of separating them is paramount. Future passenger hub should help to reduce physical and social barriers and encourage design teams to think creatively about site layouts, building design and uses. Analysis from the ThinkStation project recommended that future mobility hub designs should: Prioritise public, physical connections across the railway; Consider the wider community and stakeholders beyond the red line throughout the design process; Reduce physical barriers in passengers hubs to allow greater transit and non-transit movement.[21]

Multi-modal connectivity. Beyond train stations, integrated forms of active and public transport are vital for high street connectivity and footfall. Our ExploreStation report found that transport nodes should support high street regeneration and ensure accessibility and safety of key walking routes, including clear signage, lighting, clear sightlines, and well-maintained and level surfaces to encourage footfall between the transport nodes and high street. There was a clear mandate from participants that connectivity be viewed not simply as how people get to and from the station, but also in terms of building the relationships and partnerships that enable the station to become embedded as part of local community life.

Conclusion

There is massive potential for design-led high streets renewal. High streets must adapt to play their part at the heart of local, equitable green transitions and to meet the diverse needs of the UK’s 21st century communities. As the UK’s National Strategic Advisor on design, the Design Council has an important role to play in supporting government and communities to create more sustainable, vibrant and resilient places.