The reality of trying to turn the tide of decay

The prolonged and worsening situation with regard to the vacancy of shops, poor state of repair of historic buildings and deteriorating appearance of the Gainsborough Town Centre Conservation Area as a whole, is a source of sadness and frustration for many.

What is the Council doing about it?

The vast majority of the properties in the Town Centre are privately owned. As such, the Council is unable to make improvements forcibly to properties that it doesn’t own. Equally, the Council cannot force high street brands to locate their shops in the centre of Gainsborough. That is an economic decision for them.

However, the Council has made generous grants available to owners and longer term tenants for a variety of purposes. After a lengthy application process, significant funding was secured from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a Townscape Heritage Initiative which offers grants of up to 85% for specific repair and architectural reinstatement works to as many as 28 historic buildings. So far, despite the owners and tenants being approached directly and repeatedly by the Townscape Heritage Officer, since March 2020, promoting the scheme, no applications for the grants have so far been received by the Council, though at least four are in the pipeline. The Council has also secured funding to offer grants of up to £25,000 under the Living Over The Shop grant scheme to encourage residential use of vacant upper floors of buildings – and has managed to extend the funding because of insufficient interest from owners within the original timeframe. More successful was a Council backed grant scheme to encourage owners to reinstate historic shopfronts – which resulted in considerable improvements to buildings in Market Street.

So the Council has been trying, over a number of years, and continues to try to help improve the town’s historic buildings by providing generous grants – but has no power to force the buildings’ owners and long term tenants to take up the grants and make the much needed improvements. This is a shame, because unless they do, the town centre will continue to look run down and unattractive, which will put off shoppers, thus reducing the attractiveness for retail and visitor economy businesses to locate here.

 

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