Elland Future High Street Fund - Public Realm

The project is funded by the Future High Street Fund awarded to the Council to renew and reshape the town centre and high street of Elland in a way that improves experience, drives growth, and ensure future sustainability. The town is currently underperforming with a combination of facilities and assets that fail to draw the demand needed to revitalise the town. The upgrading proposals look at strengthening the distinctive heritage character of the area and addressing the issues created by a vehicle dominated environment. The objective is to create a distinct local attraction where businesses, residents and visitors can thrive in a safe and accessible public realm with pedestrian priority. This is achieved by traffic calming measures which involve road closures at key locations; a re-alignment of road kerbs to reduce carriageway width; increasing footpath widths to allow more space for business spill-out and pedestrians; increasing green infrastructure and changes to current parking arrangements. To create a coherent streetscape character re-surfacing of roads, footpaths and public gathering spaces with a limited palette of materials are proposed. It is recommended that this introduction to the proposed works is read in conjunction with the RIBA Stage 3 report as this describes the proposals in more detail and gives background information.