Bedford High Street’s ‘Townscape Heritage Initiative’ will be drawing to a close at the end of this summer. 2 renovation projects are currently nearing completion and 2 more will be starting on site shortly. The scheme will have funded works to 15 historic properties (including 6 listed buildings) that needed repairing, had unsympathetic shop fronts to replace with traditional shop fronts and/or had large amounts of vacant floor space to bring back into use. The grants comprised funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Bedford Borough Council and BedfordBID, with the remainder of the cost met by the property owner or tenant. The traditional shop fronts were designed by referring to historic photographs of High Street and each of the particular buildings, to ensure authenticity.

The THI project has also delivered numerous educational and training events for construction students at Bedford College and local contractors and agents, to enhance local knowledge of appropriate materials and methods of working with Bedford’s historic buildings. There are further hopes that the work on High Street will be followed up by efforts to de-traffick the roadway to enhance the pedestrian and trading environment, to encourage more people to visit High Street and property owners to continue the investment in repair and improvement works that the THI project has set in train.