Hampshire Town Centre Qualitative Assessment 2000

Town centres play an important role in their local communities. They provide a focal point for a whole range of services and facilities, and are important social meeting places for local people. Yet town and district centres have faced increasing competition in the last twenty years from out-of-centre stores and shopping complexes. For all these reasons, local authorities are now continually looking to improve the quality of the environment of their town and district centres.

Planning Policy Guidance Note 6: Town Centres and Retail Development encourages the improvement of town centres `vitality and viability'. One of the indicators to monitor vitality and viability, is each town centres' environmental quality.

To help meet with this requirement, the Hampshire Town Centre Qualitative Assessment survey 2000 assesses the physical amenity and the environment of 37 town centres in Hampshire. The centres are:

· all those referred to in Policy S1 of the adopted Hampshire County Structure Plan 1996-2011 (Review), with the exception of Southampton City Centre

· additional district centres from each District apart from Southampton, Portsmouth, Test Valley and Basingstoke and Deane.

The Assessment shows that Hampshire centres have generally good environmental quality, with an overall improvement in quality over the three years since the previous survey in 1997:-

· 16 centres received a score that was higher than in 1997

· two had the same score

· only seven had lower scores.

The 2000 survey included 12 district centres not surveyed in 1997. Of these, seven scored either `average' or above.