Last week saw the completion of improvement work on Furnace and Ifield Parades. Crawley Borough Council owns 11 neighbourhood shopping parades and has been proceeding with an improvement programme on all of them. We have now completed nine, including the major Bewbush and Langley Green neighbourhood centre regeneration projects. This leaves shopping parades inThree Bridgesand Tilgate as the next pieces of work. The whole effort was deliberately accelerated by two years during the recession to demonstrate that progress could be made during difficult times.
Typically the work on the neighbourhood parades has included improved parking, lighting, planting and general layout. All of the areas are different and have received some bespoke improvements as well. An example is Furnace Parade whose access has been completely transformed. It used to have a tiered access with steps but it is now level and looks as though it has always been that way. At Crawley Council, we are most grateful to the community and partner organisations for making all of these changes possible.
The neighbourhood shopping centres have evolved over the history of the New Town. Along with a place of worship, a community centre and a pub, they were the essential building block of the neighbourhood structure. Over the years, the trades represented have changed dramatically. At one time, a parade would typically include a bicycle repair shop, a butchers and a greengrocer for example.
Some trades are no longer present, reflecting the way that many people live their lives today. Other new trades have been added in response to the same influences. The obvious example is that of the take away whose offerings are much more diverse as compared to the time that the New Towns were created. Although sometimes decried, such units can increase parade footfall as well as providing a service that many of us take up.
Other influences have been the building of superstores offering a vast array of products. Their presence has affected the viability of some standalone trades but there is good evidence of our neighbourhood outlets adapting. We increasingly see larger general store units restoring the local availability of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables.
Crawley Council owns 144 shop units on 11 parades and we hope that our investment over recent years will have done something to preserve and encourage local shopping. We have further aspirations around local shopping and these include starting improvement work on the privately-owned shopping parades. First up will be Broadfield Barton where we are already developing effective and worthwhile partnerships.
There are other local shopping areas that we can work to improve and we have further plans in the near future to support neighbourhood shopping. We recognise that by far the best way to make this happen is for people to actually use their neighbourhood facilities.
Councillor Bob Lanzer, Leader of Crawley Borough Council
2nd August 2011