The value of green and healthy town centres

The increased desirability of town centres perceived to be ‘healthy’ will inevitably start to be reflected in property and land pricing.

While the UK has always been proud of its town parks and London has long topped the world city charts for provision of green space, a lot of our town centres still remain really urban in appearance, filled with large swathes of concrete, tarmac and brick.

Not only are these places unattractive, they often suffer from traffic pollution and are perceived as unsafe. It was these kinds of conditions that inspired the Garden City and New Town movements last century and yet they are still with us in the 2020s.

However, I see substantial change on the horizon. In the same way that technology can allow people in town centres to become more connected, as we explained in our previous blog as part of our Town Centre Futures series, natural landscaping can draw people back into previously uninviting town centres.

The pandemic has certainly underlined the value of outdoor space, though we were already beginning to understand just how much access to green space contributes to improved mental health and wellness, which in turn has an impact on a diverse range of factors, from social cohesion to economic performance.

Measuring the ‘healthiness’ of our town centres has historically been tricky, though our friends at the University of Liverpool’s Geographic Data Science Lab have recently come up with a convincing model. Their AHAH Index includes a range of relevant data sources, including access to retail and provision of green spaces, which can be visually plotted on a map. Toggling the green spaces option (try it on your own local area) shows how many places in the UK aren’t currently doing that well when it comes to public outdoor amenities.

Now I’m not suggesting that town centres need to bulldoze large parts of themselves in favour of parkland, though Stockton (Teesside) is proposing to do just that, replacing its 384,000 sq ft Castlegate shopping centre with a riverside park.

Small-scale, community-run spaces, such as the Skip Garden at Argent’s King’s Cross or the Bronx Community Garden in New York show what can be achieved. More ambitious projects include the current greening of London’s Oxford Street with tree planting and pocket parks and the use of a park to conceal an underground car park at Grosvenor’s Liverpool ONE. Larger parkland areas like Chicago’s Lurie Garden provide even greater benefits, including better air quality and increased biodiversity.

Those types of factors haven’t traditionally been factored into land value equations, but, again, I think that may be about to change. The increased desirability of town centres perceived to be ‘healthy’ will inevitably start to be reflected in property and land pricing. Green spaces are likely to become an integral part of the truly mixed-use schemes that will characterise future development and that we are already beginning to see.

Who is responsible for maintaining – and paying for – these open spaces is an interesting question that I believe has no single answer. The unique nature of many of our town centres means that bespoke solutions are most likely, rather than a one-park-fits-all approach.

At P-THREE we are constantly keeping an eye on inspiring places at home and abroad and we think the approaches to green spaces that these mainland European cities are taking could spawn ideas that could usefully be adopted by British town centres:

Barcelona, Spain: The city has adopted a 10-year plan to create green axes throughout the central area, including new public green squares at 21 road junctions so that no one is further than 650 ft from a small park.
Gothenburg, Sweden: A former harbour area has been reborn as the city’s waterfront Jubileumsparken (Jubilee Park), including a free-to-all multi-storey sustainable sauna (yes, really!)
Paris, France: The famous Champs-Élysées is set for a radical revamp by 2030, transforming it from a traffic-choked thoroughfare to an “extraordinary garden”.

As well as becoming greener and better connected, to attract regular return footfall we think our town centres need to be fun places to visit. Check back here for the final blog in our Perspectives Town Centre Futures series looking at Entertaining Town Centres.

Article by Hannah McNamara, Co-founder P-THREE

Photo credits: Lurie Garden, Chicago (https://www.luriegarden.org)