Southampton City Council appointed Feria Urbanism to explore whether a neighbourhood plan would be appropriate for a city centre location.

Although the area had seen a decline in footfall in recent years, it remained home to a lively mix of shops, businesses, and residents; our role was to work with the business community to identify key issues and assess them against a planning and design framework to determine the potential value of pursuing a neighbourhood plan.

Our final report advocated a range of practical projects and actions to be delivered by the local business community before embarking on a neighbourhood plan. These actions included radical new shop front designs, the use of temporary road closures to enable to promotion of street events and festivals and the creation of small tasks groups to monitor the changing patterns of land use and shop occupation.

In September 2015, the traders group acted upon one of the key recommendations and held a street festival; using a temporary road closure to reclaim the street from traffic, the event was a huge success.