They are the home of our shared stories and history, and hubs for everything that bring people together. More than that, they are the 'front room' of a town - they are intrinsically linked to how people think and feel about their place.
Renfrewshire Council has a number of specific strategies in place to ensure all our town centres are thriving places people can be proud of and want to live, visit and do business. The biggest of our centres, Paisley, has lots to be proud of - but some well-documented challenges we want to tackle.
We understand many people have fond memories of the bustling Paisley High Street of days gone by, but the world has changed - and Paisley has to too. We can't turn the clock back to the High Street of 30 or 40 years ago, but we can look to the future and consider what the town centre needs to thrive again - and that means radical thinking. Last year, Paisley was chosen by the Scotland's Towns Partnership and the Scottish Government to be a pilot case for a piece of work reimagining how a town centre could be redesigned to better meet future need.
That document - the Paisley Vision - is now published. We will look in more detail below at what it says but it is important to stress the Vision is not a set of plans - it's a set of ideas looking at what could be possible. The Vision is jointly owned by a number of partners - while Renfrewshire Council endorses the thinking behind it, the ideas it contains are not ours, and we are not required to deliver on them. You can read the full document for yourself via the Re;lated Documents list right.
We want the Vision document to start a big conversation about Paisley town centre which will help change it for the better over the years ahead. Please read on Paisley town centre's challenges are not unique - all towns and cities are facing the same problems, and the traditional UK high street is in decline.
Around one in 10 units on UK high streets are empty. The big-name retailers which once filled towns everywhere are either going out of business or reducing store numbers to concentrate on the highest-footfall locations, which tend to be in cities or out-of-town.
So towns cannot rely solely on shops any more - they have to offer more. Another challenge for Paisley is that Scotland's biggest city and some of the country's largest retail and leisure destinations are within easy reach. And while the town is architecturally beautiful, a town centre built over centuries cannot offer the same convenience or ease of access as modern facilities built around the car.
You can read more about the challenges for Paisley town centre and what the council can and can't do to tackle them here. There's lots we are doing already. Renfrewshire Council believes the future for Paisley town centre is in using what sets it apart to attract new life and footfall, which will in turn encourage people to invest.
We have loads to shout about. Paisley has a great location, thriving cultural scene, stunning buildings and fascinating history. Here's what already happening to make the most of that:.
The paisley. That momentum will continue over the years ahead through Future Paisley - a radical and wide-ranging programme of events, activity and investment designed to put culture at the heart of the area's ongoing regeneration.
We are encouraging residents and staff to Spend Local and support them. That shows Paisley town centre is recognised as an attractive place to live.
It was produced by Threesixty Architecture. Their brief was to imagine how Paisley could be redesigned to deliver a re-energised High Street. The issues they looked at affect towns everywhere - and the authors believe Paisley's response to them could see it become recognised as a leader for towns throughout Scotland and the UK. They focused on the area around the High St at the heart of the town centre.
Events were held to gather views from key stakeholders - including community groups, businesses, educational establishments and private developers, and an expert panel convened to look at the results. What they produced is based on the idea that Paisley town centre has more retail space than it needs - now and in the future. The authors suggest that rather than managing the decline of the old way of doing things, Paisley can be transformed by finding new uses for that empty space, based around community need.
They are clear the Paisley of the future will still have shops - as they say 'retail will go where people go'. But they suggest the remaining retail could be concentrated together - allowing vacant space to be filled by new uses which will bring people in, and support local traders.
Ideas suggested by the authors include:. This could be done through building a new residential quarter, filling existing gap sites with flats, or new homes on the upper floors above existing retail units;.
The authors suggesting repurposing a shopping centre 'could save a High Street There are a number of towns and cities around the UK where this is already happening. The authors cite the example of the Bargate in Southampton - where the city centre is being transformed by the demolition of a largely-vacant shopping centre for a mixed-use development, opening in The report presents ideas for what could go on the space currently occupied by the Paisley Centre - including a new residential quarter along a pedestrianised street running from the High Street to New Street with a mixture of retail and food and drink on the ground floor, flats on the upper floors, and new outdoor public spaces.
They suggest this would bring benefits - repopulating the heart of Paisley with new residents, creating new views and routes through the town, and allowing shops to be brought back onto street fronts rather than buried in a block. If that happened, what would happen to existing tenants in the Paisley Centre and elsewhere? Again, we have to stress the contents of the Vision are just ideas designed to start a conversation around what is possible.
If any plans to demolish or repurpose the Paisley Centre or any other town centre building were developed, the businesses operating from those buildings would be helped to find new premises elsewhere in the town centre or High Street.
Support packages would be tailored to the individual circumstances of the business and their preferred space to move to. Change of the scale imagined in the Vision couldn't happen without some disruption but the hope is it would lead to those businesses operating in a better-balanced town centre with hundreds of new residents, more businesses on the High Street, reduced vacancy rates, and increased footfall. The site is now occupied by the Piazza shopping centre, built in and officially opened in Although Renfrewshire contains the traditional county town of Renfrew, from which its name derives, Paisley is the administrative centre and main settlement.
Renfrewshire is the successor of the former Renfrew District. It covers a slightly smaller area than its predecessor. Some of the district, including the towns of Barrhead, Neilston and Uplawmoor were transferred to the new East Renfrewshire area when Strathclyde Region was partitioned in Search term:.
Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving.
0コメント