AMT Public

Prosperous Places

England’s 1,600 market towns have been hard hit by the recession, with unemployment overall rising by a third more than in the nation as a whole. Shop vacancies have increased and empty shops are getting harder to let.

But towns are fighting back. Town Partnerships and Town Councils are working locally to bring renewed vitality to their town centres. Action for Market Towns is providing research, lobbying and helping to promote the sharing of good practice between towns.

Here we bring together a range of resources, including case studies, all linked to the campaign theme of Prosperous Places.

AMT’s Policy Position Statement for Prosperous Places

This paper focuses on the economic issues facing market towns, in terms of the traditional high street/retail offer and the wider local economy. The document identifies ten key challenges that AMT will work to address. These include the lack of policy recognition for a wider economic role and diversity, threatened environmental sustainability, stop-start regeneration and investment, and stretched local governance and partnership.

Read AMT’s Policy Position Statement for Prosperous Places (pdf)

AMT’s Campaign Plan

Our Campaign Plan sets out how we are addressing the challenges laid out in the Policy Position Statement. Some of these we are leading on ourselves, some in partnership with others, and some we are purely supporting the work of others.

View the Prosperous Places Campaign (Spreadsheet).

Rejuvenating Market Towns: Innovation to drive excellence

The High Streets in small towns face many of the same issues and solutions faced by all towns. The main differences are due to scale and the interaction with neighbouring settlements through competition or remoteness. Most small towns are pretty near the bottom of the shopping ‘food chain’ and therefore have to find their own niche to compete and survive as retail centres.

Speaking at the Retail Week Conference on Saving Britain’s High Streets in March 2010, AMT Chief Executive Chris Wade said that future solutions are dependent on combining the strategic understanding of government, with a local spirit of self-reliance and enterprise that is right for the time.

Download the Rejuvenating Market Towns speech (opens Word doc)

AMT’s Towns-4-Towns – helping towns to beat the recession

Many small towns have suffered similar problems during the recession and can benefit by sharing solutions, experience and good practice. AMT’s Towns-4-Towns programme lets towns share ideas and initiatives that have worked in their communities.

AMT’s member towns can share their recession-beating initiatives, or learn from others, in a number of ways:

Case Studies
AMT’s Case Studies provide useful ideas and examples of good practice in market towns. See selected projects below – many more are available to members in our Case Studies Database.

AMT Forum
Visit the AMT Forum to share your ideas, ask advice of other towns that have run similar projects and give information about initiatives that your town, or one you know of, has put in place to tackle the recession.

Towns-4-Towns Exchange Fund
Got a project in mind? Why not learn more from those who have already done it. AMT’s Towns-4-Towns Exchange Fund can help AMT member towns by part funding the cost of learning about and developing the project, including feasibility work and business planning.

Networking Events
Are you a local authority, rural forum, market town network or other organisation that works with rural towns? Why not bring your towns together at a networking event, to share experiences and learn from one another? We will work with you to put on a programme of Networking Events tailored to the problems faced by the towns in your area. Take advantage of AMT’s experience, resources and knowledge of transferable projects across the country. Through our Towns Alive programme we can subsidise such events by up to 50%.

Your town as a department store

Think of your high street as a department store – and then think through what a department store needs to get right to attract you as a customer. That will give you a pointer to interventions you can make to improve the attractiveness and viability of your town centre.

Get AMT’s top ten tips for beating the recession on the high street

Loyalty cards give high street a boost

To coincide with the publication of our Policy Position Statement, we have put together information for those of you looking for ways to increase footfall to your high street and shops. We explore the value of customer retention in an increasingly competitive market, and how some towns have started to use loyalty cards as a way of persuading more shoppers to shop locally.

Read Encouraging shoppers to spend in your high street

Prosperous Places Library

To help make your town a more prosperous place, we have put together a series of downloadable reports and research papers.

Visit our Prosperous Places Library

amt-i research and consultancy help for high streets

Action for Market Towns and the Commission for Rural Communities have campaigned for rural towns to have more prominence in the Department for Communities and Local Governments work to ‘Help High Streets’. As a ‘national voice’, AMT is aware that for a number of years market towns have struggled to manage town centre activities with a lack of resources, declining footfall and an increasing number of vacant units.

The recent CRC/amt-i/CLES ‘Understanding and Supporting the Resilience of Market Towns (opens pdf)’ report further illustrated how the recent economic downturn has sharpened these inherent problems.

Over the last two years AMT’s research arm, amt-i has recognised the need for the provision of practical tools to help those working to revitalise and regenerate towns. A range of Town Centre Services provided by amt-i benefit both individual towns and those with wider strategic involvement.

One-off Car Parking Studies, Signage Audits and Visitors Surveys offer innovative and objective reviews of some of the most important aspects associated with the high street while, strategically, a suite of the Town Centre Services can be deployed in a town or a region for holistic research.

Town Benchmarking
One of the most popular tools for both one-off and holistic reviews is the innovative online Town Benchmarking system. Town Benchmarking provides towns with a framework and methodology to effectively collect pertinent data regarding their town centre at a minimum cost.