UK Town Research Articles

Chip and PIN gets the consumer vote

For the past few years, the UK banking industry has been rolling out bankcards containing chip technology. So far, most news connected to the roll out has been limited to trade press articles about technical specifications, security and value- added services. Consequently, few consumers have noticed — or understood — that their bankcards have become ‘smart’. All this is set to change with the launch of a pilot involving chip and PIN technology in the UK town of Northampton.

Geographic information – policy driving – policy driven – providing statistics for the UK's town centres

Geographic information – policy driving – policy driven – providing statistics for the UK's town centres

Exploring the Role of CCTV Surveillance Systems in Town Centre Management

Within the UK the past three decades have witnessed dramatic and continuing changes in the geography of retail provision. During this period the traditional supremacy of town and city centres at the top of the retail hierarchy has been increasingly successfully challenged by the development and diversification of out‐of‐town and edge of town shopping facilities. This ‘out of town exodus’ (Schiller, 1987) can be traced from the food superstores opened by grocery retailers from the late 1960's onwards through the development of retail warehouses, retail parks and regional shopping centres (Guy, 1994) to a more recent ‘fourth wave’ (Fernie, 1995) which include warehouse clubs, factory outlet centres and airport retailing. The cumulative effects of these developments are seen to pose a major challenge to retail businesses in town and city centres and perhaps more fundamentally to the centres themselves. The traditional spirit of the UK's town and country planning policies, first established some fifty years ago, was to positively support retail activity in town and city centres and to restrict out of town retail development (Guy, 1994). However, from the early 1980's onwards, such policies had only a limited effect in stemming the tide of retail decentralisation and they often seemed to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Scenario workshops: A participatory approach to sustainable urban living?

Cities have increasingly become a focus for environmental action, and many governments are in the process of devising strategies for sustainable development in urban areas. However, dissatisfaaction with traditional approaches to environmental policy making has led to the rise of interest in involving the public in the process of plan and policy formulation. This paper provides a brief review of the rationale for increasing public participation in policy making, and focuses on one attempt to do this through the use of scenaario workshops. The experience of the UK town of Preston is used to look at the effectiveness of this approach both in bringing about sustainable urban living, and as a truly participatory approach to policy making.

The Social Segregation of the Long-Term Unemployed in Hartlepool

This paper reports on research designed to investigate the nature and implications of the social segregation of the long term unemployed in a Northern UK town suffering high rates of unemployment. The project is designed to test the hypothesis that the social polarisation identified by Pahl (1984), confirmed by this writer's small scale research, and apparent in national statistics, reaches beyond the household to the extended family, and to friendship and neighbourhood contacts. Work history evidence from a sample of 791 married couples is used to establish the importance of informal information flows in shaping employment prospects, and additional material is presented which shows concentrations of unemployment in particular kinship and friendship networks. These data, together with evidence that employed informants are the most effective means of job access, demonstrate that a complex of factors will act together to reduce the chances of the long term unemployed finding work.

British and American community design: Clarence Stein's Manhattan transfer, 1924–74

Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's 1928 design for the new town of Radburn, New Jersey, was much influenced by Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. Radburn was written about and discussed as the ‘Radburn concept’ in the 1930s and 1950s, especially after Gordon Stephenson published Stein's community designs in the Town Planning Review in 1949. Lewis Mumford championed its cul‐de‐sacked traffic safety, continuous pedestrian systems and linear, open space structure of superblocks. Stephenson, Arthur Ling and Hugh Wilson, joined by many UK town planners, designed many Radburnesque higher density layouts in many post‐World War II new town residential areas. The idea was a feature of Cumbernauld's pedestrianized design. It fell into disfavour in the mid‐1960s in Britain and at the same time was transferred again from Manhattan by Stein himself through Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey to Kittimat, British Columbia, Reston, Virginia, and via Stein's book, Toward New Towns for Amer...

An environmental impact assessment of the proposal to build a wind farm at Langdon Common in the North Pennines, UK

This paper measures the diversity of environmental impacts inherent within a proposal by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) to build a demonstration wind farm at Langdon Common in the North Pennines, UK. This assessment was made in April, 1989 in the wake of the European Community Directive on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and its subsequent interpretation within the UK Town and Country Planning (Assessment of Environmental Effects) Regulations (1988).

Ebenezer Howard brought up to date?

Abstract Arguably, Ebenezer Howard has been the most seminal influence in UK town and country planning. Although Garden Cities of Tommorow 1 is only a slim volume it raises almost all the issues that still bedevil planning in practice. The sprawl of cities, green belts, land values, tenure, transportation, zoning, pollution, social mix, recreation, regionalism — they are all discussed in this book and brought into a coherent amalgam in his plan for a garden city.