Midlands megalopolis chosen as one of 12 ‘Portas Pilots’ and will receive £100,000 to aid regenerate its recession-hit centreIt’s over two years immediately since Wolverhampton was voted fifth worst megalopolis in the earth by Lonely Planet and Wulfrunians are still smarting. “It was just a pathetic list made up by one person. The media jumped on it since it came at that silent age between Christmas and fresh year, however it really, really hurt the community community,” said Kim Gilmour, operations director of the megalopolis centre management corporation. “I reckon that human beings should come and visit us and see for themselves what we have to offer.”Happily for Gilmour, Wolverhampton’s potential has been spotted by the retail guru Mary Portas, who has chosen the megalopolis as one of 12 “Portas Pilots”, which will each receive £100,000 from the administration. The money will be used to resuscitate the megalopolis centre, which, like most of the other pilots, has been particularly dense hit by the recession. A total of 370 towns applied to be one of the “Portas Pilots”.Wolverhampton wowed Portas with its thought of introducing “contemporary town criers” to shout about the megalopolis’s best bits (“They’ll shout ‘oh yey, oh yey!’ and then tell human beings what’s on,” said Gilmour). However most of the money will be used for a Dragon’s Den-style project to support entrepreneurs while solving one of the megalopolis’s largest problems. Wolverhampton has the fifth highest level of empty shops in the nation, and so fresh businesses will be given grants to go into abandoned buildings to trade and showcase their employment.With just under 9,000 residents, Liskeard in Cornwall is a minnow compared with Wolverhampton, however it has alike problems. Twenty-two shops are lying empty, 14% of the town’s retail hour, and as Sally Hawken reluctantly attests, it’s become the sort of place human beings leave rather than head to. “Twenty-five per cent of our economically active human beings employment in Plymouth,” said the charity worker. “They propel over the Tamar bridge to another county, and since when they are finished everything in Liskeard is shut, they do their shopping and socialising in Plymouth also.”As another of the “Portas Pilots”, Hawken and other volunteers in Lizkeard hope to reverse that trend by “injecting fun back into the tired town centre”. They hope to tempt shoppers back from the outside-of-town supermarkets with guerrilla gardening projects and “yarn bombing”, which Hawken says will involve “covering benches and things with knitting”.They also have a plot entitled Floral Toilets which aims to spruce up the public loos with hanging baskets. They’ve already carried outside their first flashmob, dubbed a “cashmob”, where they persuaded human beings to wear red and spend £10 in the town centre and then report back what they spent the money on.Unlike Wolverhampton, Liskeard doesn’t have an obvious image difficulty – it’s just that not enough human beings consider the town worth a visit, said Hawken. “When human beings in London reckon of Cornwall, they reckon of sandy beaches and coastlines and it’s just not like that here,” she said.Some human beings were wary about applying for the grant for dread of generating adverse publicity, admitted Hawken. “There were a couple of human beings who said ‘do we desire to do this? Isn’t this bringing the incorrect sort of attention to Liskeard, suggesting it’s down at heel?’.”In the end, though, they chose being a pilot would draw attention to Lizkeard’s charms. “We can’t shy away from the circumstance there are challenges in the town,” said Hawken, “however there are a abundance of excellent things also.”Bedminister’s difficulty is that also many human beings propel through it without stopping, said Ben Barker, a resident in the Bristol suburb since the 1970s. “Our specific issue is that we are awash with traffic. If you propel from A to B in the Bristol area we are often in the middle,” said the 73-year-ancient, who was the driving energy behind Bedminster’s successful bid for £100,000 from the Portas pot.Barker and other volunteers desire to employ the money to constitute more human beings shop in the area rather than speeding by on their path to a retail park or Bristol megalopolis centre. The most unusual aspect of their plot is to introduce a bicycle rickshaw supply which will deliver human beings’s shopping to their homes. “And if that goes well, we hope to expand it into a taxi supply,” said Barker.Portas said: “It is immediately clearer to me than ever that Britain wants its town centres revitalised and the energy and accountability for that needs to rest with the human beings who live and do business there.”Community administration minister Grant Shapps said on Fridayyesterday that unsuccessful applicants should not despair – the quality of the bids had been so high that he was launching a second round of the competition, which will see 15 additional pilots announced in July. Applicants should submit their bids by 30 June.Shapps said there was no demand for unsuccessful applicants to reapply, however they could sharpen up their bids if they wished and submit them again by 30 June, which was also the deadline for fresh town teams to apply.He said it was clear that Portas’s review into the high street was the “catalyst communities craved” to get together and secure the prospect of their town centres.RegenerationWolverhamptonMary PortasCommunitiesHelen Piddguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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