Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan

by Nick Rogers

Havant Borough Council are leading on an exciting project to develop a masterplan for Waterlooville Town Centre. With the support of an external project team of planners, designers and architects, the Masterplan will provide a vision and plan for future regeneration. This can then be used to identify key areas of growth, future development and identify improvements to the local economy, town centre precinct and its surrounding areas. It will also be used to attract businesses and enable us to apply for government funding.

As part of this, we have run several engagement exercises as we recognise that it is vital that we hear from as many local people as possible during this process.

We started by holding a series of walking and digital virtual tours of Waterlooville which included residents, businesses, community representatives, councillors and other stakeholder partners. In addition to this, we met with local schools and community groups to hear their views.

The key themes raised in these tours and visits fed into the Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan: Festival of Ideas, which took place in January in the old GAME shop on London Road. These themes formed the basis of three days of facilitated workshops and interactive sessions on topics ranging from property, socioeconomics and planning policy to energy, access and movement in the town centre.

This in turn informed a gallery and exhibition event, held in January. With over 300 attendees, this event gave residents, businesses and stakeholders the opportunity to view the progress of the Masterplan design work, ask questions of our Project Team and again feed their views into the final document which will be published in the summer.

The evidence collected throughout this project is being considered by our team of planners and will form part of a planning document being designed for Waterlooville Town Centre.

We want to recognise the valuable contributions of those who have given their feedback to date – your comments will be used to shape and influence the future of your town centre.

As well as the longer term plan the work also highlighted some “quick wins”, and you should start to see some of this appear in the main shopping area, this includes new banners, street art and some exciting events. We will also be looking at a landscaping project which was one of the key themes that emerged from the consultation.

We have also relaunched round two of the Vacant Shop Scheme, in round one we awarded a grant to a developer who is converting the old NatWest branch into a restaurant. Round two is live now and we have received a number of applications already.

We will be presenting the latest updates on this project early in the summer – to keep informed about the progress of the Masterplan, please visit www.havant.gov.uk/waterlooville.

Nick Rogers is Consultation and Engagement Officer at Havant Borough Council.