Sustainable Communities: Market Towns

Our support for market towns is helping them to develop as competitive, sustainable rural centres, with the subsequent benefits for surrounding rural areas. We are working with our sub-regional partners to help town partnerships plan for their long-term future. All of this work is informing the emerging Regional Strategy for Investment in Market towns. 

Projects include:

A Whole Town Vision

One NorthEast is enabling and contributing to detailed master planning in Berwick upon Tweed and Barnard Castle.  The sub regional partnerships identified these plans as regional priorities to identify community, cultural and environmental development, as well as economic and physical regeneration projects. 

Market Town Disitnctiveness

In 2006, One NorthEast commissioned research into how investments and development planning could be used to maximise the effects of retail distinctiveness on creating great places to live, work, visit and do business.

The retail offer, shop frontage, evening entertainment, tourism offer and customer satisfaction were carefully assessed in Guisborough, Alnwick and Barnard Castle, to come up with a series of recommendations to address areas for improvement.

The work is helping us put together a web-based toolkit that will support other towns in developing strategies and action plans. This approach was pioneered in North East England, and is now being looked at in other parts of the UK.

For more information go to www.distinctiveness.co.uk