Town Centre Retail Case

We were commissioned to prepare a detailed evidence base on the social, economic and regeneration benefits of large scale town centre retail led developments.  Our research demonstrated that these benefits are of a different scale and importance to those which might be generated from similarly sized out-of-town developments.

The research made use of data on the socio-economic profile of town centre retail workers and also the profile of those using town centres for retail and leisure purposes.  We also compared the environmental impact of different forms of development using travel-to-work and travel-to-shop evidence sourced from the Census and a sample of John Lewis Partnership stores.     
 

The context for this work was the concern that the Barker proposals and, to some extent, the 2007 Planning White Paper would water down the policy presumption in favour of town centre development. Our report was used by both John Lewis Partnership and Westfield in their dialogue with central government on town centre planning policy.