The Regional Monitor

With backing from Whitehall, in 2001 regional development agency Yorkshire Forward launched its Urban Renaissance Programme for Towns and Cities – a scheme which aims to include local residents in the process of revitalising their communities.

A 25-year plan for regeneration has been developed for 19 urban towns, which now forms part of the corporate planning framework at Yorkshire Forward. In each case, a ‘town team’ was appointed, with a local lead panellist.

One of the towns involved is Bridlington, where plans are afoot to rejuvenate the town centre with improvements to the goods and services available and its connection to the seaside. In addition, the Old Town area of Bridlington will provide economic opportunities through its redevelopment, while a ‘Marina town’ development is under way, with the hope of creating more jobs, homes, business and leisure facilities.

“We’ve very, very poor facilities in the harbours and we want to plan them tentatively as an area and give them [fish] processing facilities,” says Martyn Coltman, owner of Bridlington Design and chairman of the town team. “At the moment the fish have to be taken away alive and some taken to an island and processed there, and then sometimes to the Far East.

“Obviously there could be a great deal of job creation by streamlining the fish processing, but at the moment it’s very cramped. This could improve things dramatically for the fortunes of the fishermen, so that’s one bit of the regeneration strategy.”

The role of the regional development agency, rather than local councils, has encouraged more residents to participate, he added.

“It’s about asking people what they want and then finding the investments to achieve that,” he says. “It’s about the local people and the business people and the residents achieving what they can achieve. I think they’ve been used to councils steamrolling in the past and now it’s a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.”

In addition to the 19 towns, Leeds has also been involved in the Renaissance regeneration project. There, the team faces very different challenges: retaining the city’s traditional character through regeneration; ensuring that new residents in the city centre are well catered for, and improving infrastructures, particularly with regard to transport.

“Perhaps for 15 years Leeds has been gradually evolving its renaissance without perhaps labelling it as such for the first 10,” said John Thorp, civil architect at Leeds City Council and a member of the renaissance team.

“City living is one of the subjects and it’s led us to be quite adventurous about the idea of using the city centre area. We’re now beginning to find ways of recommending family living within the city, even though it’s not right at the heart of the commercial districts.

“The renaissance programme has encouraged that, as a way of linking to communities on the very edge of the city centre. That’s been one of the outcomes in terms of residential development, and we’re now receiving pre-planning enquiries and doing design workshops with developers who are very interested in that idea.”

But while the focus of the projects in each of the 19 towns and in Leeds may differ, head of the Renaissance Towns and Cities project at Yorkshire Forward, Barra Mac Ruiri, insists there is one uniting goal: to restore a pride of place among Yorkshire citizens.

“We get out of our beds in the morning, sit on our motorway, and travel for an hour and a half somewhere to work, and travel back and forth. I always look at it as sheep on the motorway, and I see sheep going north, and sheep going south, and you think, how has this happened?” he says.

“In many respects, renaissance growth is about people having an emotional connection to where they’re from, where they work, where they live, what they do.”