Tag Archives: development

Talking about the town

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Today I was lucky enough to be part of a session at Ashford Borough Council on regenerating the town centre.  I’m not going to use this blog to repeat everything said there’s indeed, although it wasn’t made clear what rules applied I’m fairly confident Chatham House rules would suffice – but attending the session got me thinking again about what I should want out of my home town.

Ashford’s situation has changed a bit in the time that we lived here.  When we arrived, Ashford’s Future existed, with grandiose schemes for making Ashford truly Best Placed in Kent.  But a change of government funding policy and the overall impact of the economic downturn has put paid to that.

About 18 months ago, I was asked to speak at a Council awayday about my thoughts on Ashford 2030- the vision for the town in the next few years.  While my thoughts remain in a similar vein now, I’m aware that nothing can really happen unless funding is available, and in a recession both the public and private sectors find this hard to come by.

Now, Ashford has achieved Portas Pilot status.  This means funding is available for some things, and a snapshot of these shows that the priority areas are thought to be making the most of the market, connecting the designer outlet centre with the town so that the town can share in the estimated 5-7 million visits made there each year, and seeking arts-based development (something the neighbouring town of Folkestone seems to be doing successfully).

So I promised a few thoughts that flowed from all this…

1) Why come into town? Who is it for?
Today, rightly, the focus was on footfall. From my perspective, wrongly, it focused solely on footfall in the town centre rather than looking at the circumstances affecting that…a town centre accompanied by an outlet centre, an out of town park with restaurants and the cinema, ringed by the third biggest Sainsbury’s in the country, two Tesco extras, a Waitrose, an Asda… These things affect the High Street as much as what is actually here or not here because all of these things can be described as coming to Ashford but they are not complementary and do not feed each other.
By ignoring these factors, the towns similar to Ashford information generated felt wrong – it did not seen to bring up those with similar challenges (Swindon, Maidenhead, that sort of place) – just those with similar footfall.

More interesting is the demographics, information also potentially accessible via the 2011 census. Folkestone may well be prospering by matching its retail to its demographic- Primark, TK maxx, Peacocks. Ashford, it seems has a large, affluent, family-based group of consumers who are not being sufficiently catered for in the town. While I might feel that the fashion offering is generally either too young or too old for me, it seems the silver surfer generation feel that it is not for them either. And as the two social groups with most disposable income, this is not a healthy situation for a town.

Tenterden has many of the more upmarket retailers and those stores have indicated before that with a store there and another in Canterbury, they wouldn’t also be looking to have one in Ashford. So simply increasing market share of available consumers is not a simple matter.

Everyone always talks about pop up shops, but while they are OK if you already have regular shoppers, I can’t see how they attract new visitors or, more importantly, attract long term investment in an area. Similarly the trend for street food has not yet reached Ashford, but while street food vendors have lower overheads than hospitaIity units in permanent buildings,that lack of permanency means no long term legacy when they decide to move on.

And as for hospitality in Ashford, independents seem to keep disappearing but while there are pubs and coffee shops, I’ve found little for the mums and kids beyond fast food. I like the occasional McDonalds as much as the next woman, but what if you want to have hummus in preference to chicken nuggets?
The “nice” restaurants are outside the town centre, in Kennington, Tenterden, Mersham-le-hatch, Mersham, Bodsham… But if you’ve got to travel anyway (all of these are car journeys from Ashford) it is also in Wye, Canterbury and Folkestone’s regenerated harbour – and all of those are on the same high-speed train line as Ashford. Destination food that might lead me to spend time in the place I get it from. That’s one thing Ashford is really missing.

2) Transport: a mixed blessing
In identifying competitor towns, the tendency is always to think local. Canterbury, Folkestone, Maidstone, and slightly further afield Sevenoaks and Tonbridge Wells might seem like the natural alternatives, but for a day out shopping many Ashfordians head to Bluewater (40 minutes by car, the same by train-and-bus combo), or to London.
While there have always been commuters in Ashford, the arrival of a 38 minute high-speed link to Stratford and St Pancras International means an influx of relatively affluent families looking to spend London wages in cheaper and more rural surroundings. Season tickets at over £6000 a year are such a chunk of income that many look to get their money’s worth. So weekend trips are effectively “free” and shopping at Westfield Stratford is only half an hour away with a massive food court.
Also, without retail at the station in Ashford, I often shop on the way home from London so my wages are gained by M&S food hall at St Pancras rather than in my home town. This is daft.

The problem though is also more local. I always laugh when monorails are mentioned, remembering the conman in The Simpsons, but seriously the 50p bus ride between the outlet and the town is not doing much to encourage interchange and a fifteen minute walk under a damp railway bridge is not really going to cut it either. So feature transportation might be a worthwhile investment – something that means the kids pester to be allowed to do it (a bus ride to the hospital yesterday was described by my son as a fun day out so this is not as ridiculous as it may initially sound). And a monorail might well do just that.

3) On foot, on street parking or online?
If I need something quickly, I’ll pop into town. Particularly if I have to have something in my hand that day.
But it depends what I want. So while apparently there’s no reason why a town Ashford’s size should be sustain a music store, if there’s no hmv there anymore for that last minute birthday present, I don’t go elsewhere, I hop onto Amazon and get it delivered to the recipient’s door. Even if it does mean I won’t have it immediately.
If the small retail units in town mean that what I need (maternity clothes, big bras) are not stocked, then I’ll go online. Some retailers in town now offer to do this for me (hats off to Debenhams) which at least guarantees them the sale and I’m no worse off as delivery to home is free and only takes the same time as ordering it from their website at home would take.
Internet shopping is after all simply a glorified form of mail order, but with access to a range of products no high street could reasonably be expected to stock. But it is a threat to the high street.
I don’t think about driving into Ashford – I live within five minutes of one part of the town centre, but many people cite parking charges as prohibitively high. The lesson from Swindon seems to be to ignore the clamour to raise revenue through high parking charges and recognise that an unattractive offer becomes even less attractive if you are charged excessively to experience it.

4) Ashford is a European town
When we look for ideas we so often look to America. Some of the idea as concerning alternative rent and rate models are certainly US in origin. But the nearest non-London provisional centre to Ashford isn’t Southampton (as the Meridian TV region would have us believe). It is Lille. And getting there takes less time than you might think from Ashford, given our transport links.
No self-respecting French town would dream of talking itself down. There are syndicates d’initiative everywhere, and everywhere boosts its heritage and local produce.
Ashford is uniquely placed to take a similar approach. We should embrace the railway heritage, mediaeval buildings, 760 year market charter…
We should have an artisan farmers’ market selling local produce – the sort of thing the sadly departed Rachel’s deli sold and Evegate has a bit of. Quality is key if you want to attract regular shoppers.

Conclusion
The classic problem with Ashford is that to get it right it would be better not to be starting from here. There is a leisure park where the commercial sector should be, empty buildings and a planned commercial quarter where that leisure park should have been linking the station to the town. A new much welcome and needed John Lewis at home is going into a greenfield site outside the town rather than the vacant space between the town centre and the railway.
There’s so much space that could be used for retail but hard to know which stores are intending to fill them. And Ashford has 50% more occupation of retail by the charity sector than ought to be expected in a medium town with this population.
But we are where we are.
I think we are finally asking the right questions.
But this is a complex problem, and we need to make sure we are not reaching for simple answers just because they don’t cost as much as really investigating what can done and taking some calculated risks.
Who knows, it could make this medium sized market town really a lovely place to live.

The latest thing… the right thing?

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brilliant image of a glass of water from www.freefoto.com

Just been listening to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 which, although primarily focused on teaching children, has implications for trainers everywhere.  You can pick it up on BBC iplayer for the next few days here.

Like many trainers, I’m fascinated by what enables us to learn, and in particular the science behind it.  The programme said that the general public has a huge curiosity for understanding more about how the brain works and, to digress for a moment, looking quickly at the BBC iplayer science list reveals a programme on what science tells us about our need for religion, on the Guardian website there’s a whole section on neuroscience, and type “how we learn” into Google and you’ll get at least 194,000,000 results! 

The programme warned of the dangers of pseudoscience, ideas seeping into the public consciousness that are not fully tested and pursuing an idea too far.  

One of the best examples used was the six to eight glasses of water a day thing.  We all know (always a dangerous phrase!) that drinking 2 litres of water a day is good for us, don’t we?  Depending on what we read it can give us clear skin, healthy looking hair and nails, keep us bright and alert and better able to concentrate… yes, 2 litres of water a day is indeed miraculous.
And it is also untrue.  We need about 2 litres of fluid a day, yes, but it can come from fruit, veg, in fact any food, and from other drinks (another myth that accompanied this was that “bad for you” drinks like coffee, tea etc. didn’t count as they were diuretics… well yes, but surely you’re not meant to retain the water?  Water retention is also bad!)  The programme pointed out that while being a tiny bit dehydrated makes you less able to concentrate, being overhydrated is, according to research from the University of Bristol, just as bad! 
The reality is that you should drink when you are thirsty – in children this means having water dispensers or water bottles at school that they can help themselves to – for training adults, having some water in a dispenser in the classroom is a pretty good idea. 

Another was the visual/ audiatory/ kinesthetic learning split.  While trainers who have done the CIPD Certificate in Training Practice know that while learners have preferences, to fully learn you need to take a learner right through Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning, it seems some people are seriously taking things to extremes if you have classes tailored via session planning at at individual level to just one learning style to suit that individual’s preference.  The programme maker also stressed that the most memorable learning experiences can be those that are outside the familiar.  Hear hear.

And overextrapolation can be potentially more widely problematic at a societal level.  There’s a learning theory for small children that has been translated to older children, and indeed adults, that exercise increases memory.  That’s how it’s come across in the press in any case.  But actually the theory was related to infants and toddlers. 
We know (see, that phrase again?) that in infants, every learning experience makes synaptic connections and that these are confirmed or overwritten based on life experience.  The theory is that, for boys in particular, cross lateral movement such as crawling strengthens their abilities to make these connections because there’s a connection between physical and neural development and left-brain right-brain interconnection (NB this is not the same as saying that there’s some people that use their left-brain more than their right-brain). 
Now, if this is being used to mean that a bit of running around is necessary for children who have had bad experiences and overwrite them, then that seems to be serious overextrapolation. 
If it’s about making sure that a rounded learning experience means some activities involve some moving around, and that this might reinforce learning overall, then actually that’s just good training practice appealing to those with any Honey and Mumford Activist preference… 

But the Active Movement theory is a theory, and  even if it is wrong, it’s good for small children to crawl, be upside down a little bit, practice the muscle movements that strengthen them and enable their physical development.  And if there’s no real evidence that exercise  increases memory, whether child or adult, at least it’s physically good for you. 

So is following the latest information about things that can help students learn always the right thing to do?
Well, it depends.  As with all things science, we have to remember that neuroscientific theories of learning are just that – scientific theories. 
And the point about a theory is that it is not “true”, it’s the best idea that we can come up with based on the evidence that we have. And if we have new evidence we change the theory that we apply.  Public understanding can lag behind the movement in theories in academia. So what we think is the latest thing might not always be the right thing.

What do you think?  Have you referred to or made use of any of these types of theories in planning your training?  Let’s talk!