Bravehart has been on tour again, looking at Fleet High Street. He couldn’t believe how many empty shops there were and how many vacant and derelict offices.
The nature of shopping is changing as more and more of us shop on-line and from our mobile phones. The nature of our high streets needs to change to become centres for social activity and nightlife. Surely it would be better to re-generate a lot of these brownfield sites and replace them with affordable apartments to bring more young and old people to the town centre without the need for more traffic, rather than building a new town that will concrete over our green fields.
The We Heart Hart campaign says we need a new vision for Hart District and some joined up thinking.
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The answer to this problem as with many countries around the world is to make better use of what we already have. In other words convert the large stock of redundant and empty commercial buildings into useable housing units by the application of adaptive reuse. If a program of adaptive reuse was adopted we could turn unwanted buildings into desirable assets without the continued destruction of Greenfield sites. I was born and brought up in Hartley Wintney and am appalled at the prospect of further destruction of the South East as a result of the whim of the vindictive Prescott.
Quite agree with the sentiment of using our brownfield sites better. However, much of the pickle we find ourselves in stems from the new National Planning Policy Framework, which sadly is a Tory Party invention, not Prescott.
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How about the following ideas;
1) longer periods of free-parking for shoppers. It Might only seem a small amount to pay but it can all add up. A similar scheme in Hartley Wintney works well.
2) cheaper business rates and rent for one-off boutique shops etc. large chains might be struggling to support bricks and mortar business due to their online presence, but this is not something that a one-off business generally has to contend with.
3) landlords of empty shops should have to keep the shop fronts presentable. First impressions count and if an empty shop looks run down it can make potential new tenants think that their new venture could go the same way.