Haslingden High Street opens to it's Community
A market town’s high street is its heart, and a vital piece of infrastructure for commercial, civic and community life.
The project focused on reconnecting key destinations through the town centre, improving pedestrian movement and helping shift Deardengate from a traffic-dominated route into a more welcoming public space for people.
Like many historic market towns, Haslingden faces the challenge of how to make its town centre work better for people. Despite its strong heritage character and independent identity, the high street had become dominated by traffic resulting in fragmented pedestrian movement and a declining public realm experience. Rossendale Council’s Haslingden 2040 Vision set out a long-term regeneration framework to rethink the town centre strategically. As part of this, the Haslingden Connected project focused on improving movement into and through the town centre, reconnecting key destinations and creating a more people-focused environment. Working in collaboration with Buttress Architects, our role spanned both the strategic and local scale. Alongside advising on the detailed public realm improvements, we helped shape the wider thinking around connectivity, pedestrian movement and how the town centre should function and evolve over time.
At the strategic level, we helped deliver the ambitions of the wider Haslingden Connected vision. This included analysis of the town’s key destinations, approaches and pedestrian movement patterns, helping shape a longer-term framework for how people experience and move through the town centre.
A major part of this process was community engagement and over the five year period, we estimate that we’ve reached over 10,000 households and businesses. Insights directly informed the public realm interventions on Deardengate, helping build confidence in the wider regeneration vision.
We also helped shape a material palette that balanced conservation sensitivity with long-term durability. Reclaimed cobbles were carefully relaid across the scheme, with sawn sections introduced to create smooth and accessible pedestrian crossings. The town’s historic “big lamp” was refurbished and repositioned on a new plinth within the redesigned public realm, and a new art installation by local artist Simon Watkinson, was commissioned and erected in the town square.
Deardengate’s public realm works are the first physical improvement works to be delivered as part of Haslingden 2040 alongside new heritage shopfronts designed by Buttress Architects. Our careful selection of materials enhances the character of the conservation area, while the new planting and rain gardens form part of a climate-resilient drainage strategy. Haslingden Connected was all about reconnecting the town centre and translating a long-term regeneration vision into tangible change that people could experience.
The state of the high street matters hugely to people, and changes are rarely without contention. That’s why the early stage public engagement works, as part of Haslingden Connected, were so critical to get right. Through extensive engagement and consistent communication, the project helped bring the community and town board along on the regeneration journey, maintaining confidence that the long-term vision would ultimately deliver meaningful change.
From a space dominated by cars to a space designed for people, Haslingden’s new high street works help create a valuable, high quality space at the heart of the town.
