by Rachel Alcock-Hodgson
How can a community know what impact their work has on their local area? What are the key features of a ‘Healthy High Street’ in a Bristol neighbourhood setting? Can monitoring be robust, community-led and place specific?
In summer 2024, we1 set out to collect information about the Arnside, Greystoke and Glencoyne shopping centre of Southmead, north Bristol. The specific aim was to establish a way to monitor the impact of Southmead Development Trust’s Glencoyne Square Community led housing project. The Glencoyne Square development consists of 187 community-led homes, plus commercial and community spaces. The development will hopefully increase density and hence footfall in the neighbourhood as well as providing much needed affordable housing in the area.
The first step was to review literature about health and high streets, and to assess the tools currently available to measure this. There is somewhat of a split between those who research public health and are therefore interested in the impacts high streets can have on population health, and those who are more focused on economic performance as a measure of success / ‘health’. What is clear is that the ‘Health of the High Street’ is broader than just viability, it is also about vibrancy (see for example, Understanding your High Street Viability from the Institute of Place Management, 2022). This therefore has implications for how we measure it.
The project developed a bespoke monitoring approach for Southmead and SDT, drawing on the Place Standard tool2 (what people currently think about their place) and Public Life surveying (how people use the space at different times of day), but also incorporating specific retail/shopkeeper surveys and analysing the impact of design passive surveillance. These tools were explored and piloted with local groups including the trustees of SDT and ‘Team Southmead’ (a volunteer team of local residents). Interesting insights gathered here included views on the language used in the surveys- no-one talked about ‘the high street’, the area was described as ‘Arnside’, ‘Greystoke’ or ‘the shops’. Further, standard tools had the most frequent category for visiting ‘the high street’ as ‘more than once a week’, however many people stated they visited every day-something that would not have been accurately reflected in the broader categories we had formerly employed. These raise interesting questions about the mindsets and assumptions of people designing such tools, and the extent to which they are developed drawing on the lived experience of people from diverse neighbourhoods across the country.
We found that most people visit Arnside and Greystoke more than once a week.
Another nuance of terminology was revealed in questions about people’s impressions of the area. More than half of the respondents thought that Arnside and Greystoke are welcoming. However, in discussion, a lot of respondents made the distinction between ‘welcoming for me? Or someone else?’ Saying that they found it welcoming but thought that others might not, e.g. older or more vulnerable people, or people from other neighbourhoods.
The question about ‘healthiness’ was rephrased from the ‘Do you think the high street is a healthy place to be?’ to ‘Do you think Arnside and Greystoke help you to be healthy and make healthy choices?’ There was initially some debate how/if to include this question as some of the community development team did not feel it was very clear and it might switch people off. However, in delivering the survey, it actually went quite well and most people had an immediate reaction. If not, a useful prompt was ‘health means different things to different people – some people have thought about physical activity, some about food, some about mental health and socialising’.
More than half of respondents felt that Arnside and Greystoke do not help them to be healthy. A lot of people felt health was more about individual behaviour, rather than the design of the neighbourhood.
Through the responses to the Place Standard Tool assessment, we found that the areas with the biggest room for improvement are:
- Being listened to and having a say (Influence and Sense of Control)
- Care and Maintenance
- Feeling Safe
- Housing (Housing and Community),
- Work, training and volunteering (Work and Local Economy).
Areas judged as good currently are moving around Arnside and Greystoke, people’s feeling of identity and belonging, opportunities for social interaction and the facilities and services on offer.
This impression was supported and extended through observing how people use Arnside and Greystoke, using the Public Life Survey framework. Specifically, this included observations that the benches are well used, despite their being criticised in some earlier feedback and discussions.
People use them to rest, enjoy the sun, sort their bags out, chat and eat and drink. Arnside and Greystoke are very social spaces – early in the morning when there was a gap in traffic noise, the noise of the street was a hubbub of people talking. Also, when observing groups of people staying still, it was common for group sizes to shift and change as people met each other and stayed to talk. In the evening, young people use Arnside and Greystoke to hang out. These detailed observations helped provide a fuller picture of the area, and will be important to replicate when assessing the impact of the Glencoyne Square development. The project also conducted a survey with local businesses and undertook a retail survey using the Royal Society of Public Health’s methodology. The latter again raised questions about the standpoints of those who devised it with charity shops and barbers not being categories that were listed, but both playing important and positive parts of Arnside and Greystoke.
So, wider reflections on the utility of this project will come in the following years, when this baseline set of findings can be compared to ones gathered after the development of Glencoyne Square. For now, however, three things stand out. First, the importance of university-community partnerships in developing mutually beneficial projects. We all have learned from each other in this work, and have made a firm basis for future collaboration. Second, the need for robust monitoring, but also the need for robust questioning of the assumptions and worldviews underlying some of the monitoring tools we have. Finally, the importance of using critical understanding and local knowledge in supporting innovative and meaningful community developments.
- Rachel Alcock-Hodgson, a UWE MSc Urban Planning student, with a little bit of help from Katie McClymont, Associate Professor in Urban Planning, alongside Cecilia Casadio, project leader Southmead Development Trust ↩︎
- https://www.ourplace.scot/tool ↩︎