Projects

The North Worcestershire Economic Development and Regeneration team, a multi-authority body, commissioned PRD and project partners AR Urbanism to review options for two key high street sites on behalf of Bromsgrove District Council. The sites are at either end of the town centre, which Bromsgrove DC aims to revitalise with new workplaces, retail, and leisure.

To complement the council’s own ambitions, PRD and ARU consulted various stakeholders throughout the town centre. With this feedback, the project team developed options for the sites and PRD assessed the deliverability and viability for each, resulting in scheme options that would be attractive to the developer market, fundable, and play a wider role in regenerating the town centre.

The proposals included a mix of housing and ground floor community uses for one site and a mix of workspace and meanwhile use leisure on the other, which will enhance the existing town centre by bringing in new residents and modern, bespoke spaces for different uses.

Folkestone and Hythe District Council commissioned a multidisciplinary team, which included PRD, to develop a Place Plan for Folkestone town centre—a critical exercise to define the future role of the town centre following a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns and ongoing challenges facing the high street.

The Place Plan addresses themes such as public realm, employment, skills and training, investment, and transport. PRD developed the socioeconomic evidence base for the Place Plan as well as recommendations to enable business growth, economic development and long-term community participation.

Guided by the views of local people, the project team developed a ‘mission-driven’ approach with six missions to structure the actions of the Place Plan and galvanise external investors around shared goals. PRD helped develop these missions and identified specific outputs and outcomes against each one to enable the council to measure success and progress.

The Place Plan provides the council with a robust evidence base upon which to bid for central government regeneration funding and the ‘mission-driven’ approach has allowed external partners to see both what the council is doing and where their own investments can make contributions to the aims of the Place Plan.

Frome Gateway is an area of industrial land close to the centre of Bristol. It has a range of uses including community and cultural, industrial, manufacturing, warehousing, and retail activity. Bristol City Council re-designated the area from a Principal Industrial and Warehousing area to an Area of Growth and Opportunity. This reflects an ambition to have a denser and broader mix of uses, including new homes, workspace, retail and leisure. A Strategic Regeneration Framework is being developed to guide this change.

To support the Strategic Regeneration Framework, Bristol City Council commissioned PRD to develop an Employment Land and Skills Strategy for the area. The strategy will provide guidance on the level and nature of future employment space, ways to support existing businesses, and employment and skills approaches which will maximise the benefits for local communities. As part of this, PRD will develop scenarios promoting different growth sectors and levels of business retention as well as test viability of these.

The Strategy is underpinned by a thorough social and economic baseline which details the community, skills and employment, and local economic context of the area. Our approach to this included quantitative data collection and analysis, policy reviews and consultation with council stakeholders.

The Mayor of London’s Creative Enterprise Zones (CEZ) programme provides funding to places throughout the capital with an established or growing concentration of creative industries. Starting with six zones in 2018, the programme has grown to include 12 zones. To receive funding, each CEZ is required to establish a roster of activities the funding will support and a monitoring programme to assess impact.

In 2022, the GLA commissioned a consortium led by We Made That with support from PRD to review impact of the CEZ programme to date and provide tools to help CEZ monitor impact. PRD’s role was to collect data on jobs, businesses, business births and deaths, and turnover for each CEZ as well as a selection of comparator areas with robust creative activity. We collected data from UK Business Counts, Business Register & Employment Survey, and bespoke requests to ONS and provided a series of static graphs showing change in each area over time. We also aggregated the data into groups (e.g. all CEZ, CEZ by inception year, all comparators, London-wide) to allow for further benchmarking.

To help the CEZ monitor change in their area, we designed and programmed an interactive, publicly-accessible dashboard, providing ready-made, area-specific visualisations for job and business counts, business births and deaths, and turnover estimates. The dashboard is available here (takes ~10 seconds to load, best viewed on a desktop/laptop screen). We also generated a series of raw data spreadsheets and a Creative Enterprise Zones data repository on the GLA datastore for anyone looking to review the methodology or perform additional analysis using the data we collected.

LB Hackney commissioned PRD to design, develop and administer a new business grant fund for Hackney Central using Additional Restrictions Grant (ARG) funding (Phase 1). Phase 2 of this project builds on the activities and knowledge gained from the funded projects. It is supporting businesses to transition towards circular practices by widening the understanding of circular economy opportunities.

To achieve this, our approach consisted of the following stages:

• Using ReLondon’s definition of a circular job, we defined Hackney Central’s circular economy profile and its position to lead the transition to more sustainable practices.
• We worked closely with funded projects that are pioneering circular activities, drawing lessons from their journey and exploring how they can become circular champions.
• We developed and tailored a business survey to target circular businesses and understand the different challenges of those at various points of the circular journey.
• We are establishing peer networks and communities of practice to connect businesses, create opportunities for sharing resources between them and strengthen circular supply chains.
• We identified circular opportunities and recommendations for the next steps.

Our work will support the council to better understand specific challenges and opportunities businesses face when implementing circular practices and provide businesses with the opportunity to benefit from stronger local networks, greener practices (ahead of legislation), and ultimately lower costs.

Hackney Wick & Fish Island Community Development Trust (HWFI CDT) is developing a Circular Economy Hub in the area which aims to reduce emissions from waste, promote reusing and recycling, and encourage more participation from the local community in a circular economy.

PRD, in partnership with Charli Bristow, has been commissioned to conduct a needs assessment of waste and last-mile delivery opportunities in the Hackney Wick area to support this process and identify recommendations for interventions and next steps.

For this research, we developed an approach that allowed for a rapid scan of local business waste flows. We used a blended methodology of desktop research and semi-structured interviews with selected businesses across multiple sectors, such as creative industries, workspaces, food & beverage, and fashion & textiles. The goal was to gain an overall view of their materials inputs and outputs and understand how waste could be used as a resource within their business operations. As part of this approach, we developed a qualitative material flow analysis (MFA) which provided us with specific insights into circular opportunities. We also used our circular economy knowledge and drew from best practices to define potential interventions and next steps for implementation.

Our findings enabled HWFI CDT to consolidate areas of focus and will support them to continue their journey towards circularity.

LB Hackney commissioned PRD to establish an in-depth evidence base on Hoxton’s communities and economy with a view to informing future strategies, partnership working, delivery, and investment. The evidence drew on PRD’s detailed review of socioeconomic data and an extensive programme of community engagement to understand the lived experiences of residents, carried out with project partners Fluid.

Through this work, we helped LB Hackney understand perceptions on how the area is changing, local support networks and their capacities, the needs of residents and which areas need better support mechanisms, and how the council can work with partners to improve opportunities for residents.

Following this, PRD undertook a similar review focused on businesses in Shoreditch to review the effects of Covid-19. The two studies are directly supporting a new Action Plan for local investment.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) secured £1m of the Mayor’s Good Growth Fund to promote employment and economic growth in and around the Kensal Canalside Opportunity Area (KCOA). This has been match funded by £1m from RBKC’s Capital Fund.

Alongside regular collaborators We Made That and Redo, PRD developed a spatial framework to expand Kensal’s creative economy. Our consortium undertook a mapping exercise which revealed the importance of affordable creative workspace and civic and charitable sector clusters not just for the local area but to the wider borough. We developed interventions, including a new workspace for the area, that will ensure development in KCOA reflects and boosts the existing creative economy and brings opportunities for jobs and enterprise for North Kensington.

We also supported RBKC to draft a Supplementary Planning Document to further support the area and we are currently exploring a wider asset development strategy for the borough, in which RBKC takes a direct role to safeguard affordable spaces for the long term and embed inclusive economic growth.

The GLA’s high streets data service brings together dynamic datasets to build a detailed picture of activity across the city’s 600+ high streets, 300+ designated town centres, and 60 Business Improvement Districts. It is intended to help people understand how activity on high streets is changing, initially in light of Covid-19 but also throughout ongoing recovery and the current cost of living and doing business crisis.

In 2020, PRD advised the GLA on relevant data to consider for the service and developed an outline structure for a London-wide, multi-stakeholder Data Partnership to guide the new data service. The GLA commissioned PRD for ongoing work with the data service. Throughout 2021 and 2022, this involved training new users, running group sessions for users on new data and analysis techniques, and promoting the data service. We also added capacity to the GLA for data analysis and insight. For example, we analysed and visualised seven years of vacancy data and trends for high street/town centre premises across London; performed cluster analysis on spending trendlines to identify different typologies of Covid-19 recovery and how those typologies link to high street characteristics; and provided fortnightly reports with maps and graphs showing Central London footfall and spending to support the Let’s Do London marketing campaign throughout 2021/2022.

In 2023, we are using the high streets data to research the foundational economy across London’s high streets and town centres to identify places where the foundational economy is or is not meeting the needs of local residents.

Supported by acclaimed architects Astudio, PRD was commissioned to develop an Action Plan to secure the long-term viability of Sutton town centre. LB Sutton commissioned this innovative project to re-energise the existing strategy for the town centre, which had lost momentum as the economic downturn made the major spatial strategy for the area undeliverable.

We did a thorough analysis of the town centre’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and a review of policy, baseline data and best practices. Together with LB Sutton and local stakeholders, we developed a portfolio of short, medium and long-term interventions of varying levels of complexity, cost and risk.

The revised strategy promotes an innovative, community-driven focus, with public realm, meanwhile uses and public art being conduits to reposition the town centre at the heat of civic life. It also proposes a proactive approach that empowers the council to take control of regeneration and development in the town centre.

LB Sutton has since embarked on a range of initiatives which build on the proposals in the action plan; make the most of the town centre’s long pedestrian thoroughfare; and present a vibrant mix of uses at a human scale. These initiatives include Sutton Works (delivering innovative workspace in a former BHS department store with GLA Good Growth Funding), the Market House Hub, the Future High Streets Fund project and the Town Centre Masterplan.

Worcester Shrub Hill Station is a Grade-II listed building nearing dereliction through lack of investment. The station surroundings are similarly disinvested and poorly signposted to the nearby city centre. Early business cases and cost-benefit ratios for redeveloping the station did not support investment.

PRD is working on a long-term project with Worcestershire County Council to develop a feasible strategy for station investment and development. Following extensive viability testing, socioeconomic profiling, visioning workshops, and reviewing funding and land value capture models, we advised WCC that unlocking wider regeneration around the station and land value capture would make investment viable.

This has enabled WCC to buy 4.5 hectares of land around the station with a view to catalysing 1000 homes, 7000 jobs, and 102,000 m² of new commercial space for Shrub Hill over the next 30 years, with flexibility built in so development can respond to market changes. WCC themselves will act as an anchor tenant, moving from an out-of-town office park back to the heart of the city and repurposing an underused asset.

We are now supporting WCC and Worcester City Council to form a development plan for the 4.5 ha plus surrounding sites under other ownership. This involves identifying reusable assets, deliverable parcels throughout the site, phasing options, and potential partners.

PRD supported London and Continental Railways and Worthing Borough Council in designing, structuring and launching an innovative public-public partnership focused on development and regeneration.

The partnership will initially focus on promoting and realising development on several publicly owned but previously stalled town centre sites. Development of the sites will help realise the council’s vision for the town centre.

We subsequently provided further development management and commercial support to mobilise the partnership.