High Streets for All - Join the High Street Network
Chances are that you’re one of the 90 per cent of Londoners who live within 10 minutes of a high street. You might also know someone who works on a high street - London’s high streets hosted nearly 1.5 million jobs (before the pandemic) and are home to 41 per cent of the city’s businesses. High streets play a huge role in our everyday lives.
Across London, high streets fared differently during the pandemic. They now face huge challenges in the cost-of-living crisis, layered on top of longer-term issues like changes to the way that we shop, retail closures and vacancies, and the climate crisis. But they still hold the potential to be the most inclusive and accessible places in our city.
Supporting London’s high streets
In January the GLA brought together high street experts from Boroughs, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), community organisations and private sector to learn from our recent high streets work and consider where we go next.
We have been working on London's high streets for over a decade, providing support in the form of funding, research, guidance and partnerships to help high streets thrive. Key programmes include the Good Growth Fund, Good Growth by Design, Property X-Change, 24-hour London, the High Streets Data Service and Making Space for Culture.
We want to ensure that high streets continue to nurture businesses, jobs and opportunities and be places where people of different backgrounds come together.
The Challenge
We heard from six inspirational projects recently delivered under the High Street for All Challenge, our mission-orientated support programme that invited diverse stakeholders to join together and test out new approaches to help their high streets adapt and recover from the impacts of Covid-19.
Funding was awarded to boroughs, BIDs and community groups in places across London - from Church End to Hackney Wick, and Angel Edmonton to Norwood. The results were just as varied, ranging from cultural events to longer-term plans in areas undergoing change, night markets to community gardens.
All the projects demonstrated a need to work collaboratively to create meaningful change. With so many differing interests around high streets this is easier said than done, but local passion and a shared ambition to make high streets more inclusive – and, often, persistence - made it work!
We invite you to read more about the High Streets for All Challenge projects.
Next steps
In today’s context of rising costs and constrained funding, working together on high streets to maximise our impact is more important than ever.
Over the next year, we plan to revitalise our High Street Network knowledge sharing community. We will gather expertise from across the GLA and beyond to better understand our shared challenges, learn from each other, and collaborate on solutions to make London’s high streets more inclusive and resilient.
If you are working to improve London’s high streets or have a keen interest in their success – whether as a borough, BID, community group or another type of organisation – we invite you to join our High Street Network and be at the forefront of working together to shape London’s high streets.
To register your interest, please fill in this form.
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