Policy information sourced from Newham Local Plan 2018

SP6 Successful Town and Local Centres

Proposals that address the following strategic principles, spatial strategy and design and management criteria will be supported:

  • Strategic principles
    • Town and Local Centres should be vibrant, vital and valued as components of local neighbourhoods and the Borough as a whole, being successful in social and economic terms; and
    • Town and Local Centres should act as community foci, showcases, employment hubs and as destinations through their particular character, offer and connectivity to their hinterlands.
  • Spatial Strategy
    • Ensuring routes to and from local areas and local transport nodes and across the centre are convenient, attractive and feel safe, creating them or enhancing them where necessary;
    • The importance of a high quality, accessible public realm and a series of features and public spaces that complement the centre’s commercial offer;
    • Diversifying uses, encouraging the location of services and flexible community spaces, ‘meanwhile’ uses, quality night-time economy, visitor and cultural attractions and facilities, and the creation of residential dwellings in such centres as appropriate to their size and function, to add to their activity levels;
    • Maintaining a robust retail core whilst ensuring a variety of unit sizes, and in larger centres, markets to provide choice and meet local needs;
    • Preventing non-retail uses (particularly hot food takeaways) from clustering excessively or reaching disproportionate levels within the centre and at or adjacent to (outside the boundaries) its gateways; and
    • Managing the centres as part of a clearly defined network and hierarchy (in line with Policy INF5), encouraging consolidation of commercial uses within their boundaries, and responding to the visions for individual centres as set out in Spatial Policies S1-6.
  • Design and management criteria
    • Ensuring new developments are designed to respond to strengths and weaknesses of local character and are scaled and otherwise designed to achieve integration and coherence with the better aspects of the centre contributing to distinctive identities in line with Policies SP1, SP3 and SP5; and
    • Attending to the particular crime, anti-social behaviour and community safety concerns brought about by congregations of large numbers of people and the evening economy.

For more information please see the Local Plan 2018