Projects

After a deep Citizens’ Assembly engagement process with residents, businesses and local stakeholders, LB Camden identified a need to preserve and further develop community assets and services and to better support its residents to live full and healthy lives in the evening and night time. LB Camden commissioned PRD to develop an Evening and Night Time Strategy to bring context to the recommendations from engagement and explore both interventions and strategies for delivery within the council and with external partners.

We brought together diverse sources of data to create the evidence base for the strategy across night workers, cultural infrastructure and night time venues, business challenges, women’s safety and anti-social behaviour. This supported and added emphasis to the Citizens’ Assembly conclusions and informed our engagement across the council to identify the priority actions to be taken forward in the strategy.

Our output, the draft Camden Evening and Night Time Strategy, is currently being reviewed for adoption. The strategy proposes long-term resident and business engagement to continue to develop night time interventions and initiatives, making it responsive to local needs and continually updated as the night time economy changes and grows.

Woolwich is a historic retail centre for outer London which is experiencing significant investment into the town centre and development in riverside areas. It has issues with the town centre experience and perception, particularly around safety and anti-social behaviour at night. Having worked with RB Greenwich on the Greenwich Town Centre Night Time Strategy, we were asked to develop a bid for Woolwich to become the Mayor of London’s Night Time Enterprise Zone (NTEZ) for 2023, which was successful.

We developed a collaborative programme of events with town centre stakeholders and cultural partners at a variety of scales: smaller and more regular to engage with local residents and larger festival-style events to activate the town centre and start to change negative perceptions. Alongside this, the council engaged businesses in a Woolwich Lates branding and promotion scheme which helped businesses benefit from event days, extend their operating hours and serve new customers. We were commissioned to evaluate the impact of the programme and carried out visitor, resident, and business surveys as well as speaking to local groups at community events. We also used datasets from the High Streets Data Service to track impact of footfall and spend on event evenings to show economic and vibrancy effects of the events programme.

The Woolwich NTEZ Evaluation showed impact for businesses, visitors, communities and night workers and helped inform the GLA’s parallel report on the three 2023 NTEZ areas. The Woolwich NTEZ also catalysed partnership working around evening events and changing the town centre experience. Event attendees reported feeling more connected to each other and hopeful about the future of Woolwich, and the Woolwich Lates programme and brand will continue to be used based on the positive results of 2023.