A Toolkit for Successful Town Centres

This Toolkit is designed to be a source of inspiration for anyone who wants to make their town centre better. Whether you’re from a local authority, community group, business, social enterprise or other organisation – you will find ideas here that you can put into action.

The aim of the Toolkit is to put Scotland's policy approach to town centres into practice. It shows how you can work collaboratively with other organisations in your town centre to deliver the Town Centre First Principle, the Place Principle and the Place Standard.

By using this Toolkit in your town centre, you’ll be doing your bit to contribute to Scotland’s big future challenges – the climate emergency, health and wellbeing, inclusive growth, inequalities and community empowerment.

How to Use This Toolkit

The Toolkit is full of tried and tested ideas to help your town centre. It covers arts and culture, buildings and property, clean and green, enterprise and business, and streets and spaces. Under each topic, you’ll find:

Practical suggestions to help your town centre be active, attractive and accessible.
Examples drawn from around Scotland, all inspiring and helping us raise our game.
Other resources such as information, guides and funding. The Taking action section helps you navigate through the challenging territory of making things happen. It covers things like funding, governance and measuring success.
Inspiration from master planning the future of town centres around the country.

Is anything missing? Please tell us! We want to keep the Toolkit live and useful. So, if you want your town to be included as a case study, know of new funding or resources, or have seen a good idea or example to add to the Toolkit – please contact us.

1. Reliance

Don’t Rely on One Thing

Focusing on one attraction, facility or asset as a ‘solution’ is never enough – successful town centres need to work well in lots of ways. They have to be:

Active – with lots of things happening to bring in different kinds of people.
Attractive – pleasant places to be and spend time in.
Accessible – easy to get to, particularly by walking, cycling and public transport because of the need to decarbonise our lifestyles.

Youtube: 25 years: The cultural renaissance of Dundee, City of Discovery

Change Takes Time

Turning your town centre around can take years, because of the need for a range of actions to attract people to use and invest in the town centre. But it’s important to get started and achieve something quickly – because quick wins will demonstrate that things are changing, build confidence and support, and allow you to move forward.

Don’t make those quick wins too big or too challenging. Equally, don’t forget to start planning bigger initiatives that might take longer to come to fruition. Dundee has been working on turning its centre around for the last 25 years – check out the story in the featured video.

2. Timescale

3. Collaboration

Work Together

Remember that you’ll need to work collaboratively with other local organisations to be effective, pooling skills and resources. Working together for common purpose will achieve more than any one player can, alone.

Regenerating your town centre collaboratively will create opportunities for more people to join in. Involving community groups, social enterprises and residents will have particular benefits for health and wellbeing, tackling loneliness, empowering communities and reducing inequalities.

There are immense benefits in working with the local community as a partner – it’ll mean more buy-in, more support and more opportunities to secure outside funding.

Who is This Toolkit For?

This Toolkit is for anybody who wants to make their town centre better. That includes:

Community-led organisations, such as Business Improvement Districts, Development Trusts, Community Councils and Housing Associations.
Town centre businesses, social enterprises and community groups.
Local authority officers such as those working in planning, economic development, community development, parks and transport.
Politicians, whether local councillors, parliamentary representatives or government ministers and their departments.

How was the Toolkit prepared?

Scotland’s Towns Partnership developed this Toolkit with support from the Scottish Government. The content is based on suggestions from hundreds of people across the country, to whom we are immensely grateful.

It takes over from the original Town Centre Toolkit published in 2015. That had a great focus on design and public space, so if you're interested in those things it's worth a look.

The new Town Toolkit is a living resource. If you have suggestions or examples to add, please contact us.