Croydon a vibrant place to live, work and visit

Happy New Year to all Masthead readers. January is a time for reflection on the highlights of the last year and a look ahead to all the opportunities that lie ahead in 2024.

For Croydon, this signals an exciting time in the regeneration of our town centre as we develop our town centre strategy and progress projects to restore pride and make Croydon a vibrant place to live, work and visit.

At the end of 2023, six infrastructure and public realm projects took a big step forward to improve connections throughout Croydon town centre, following a successful bid for £18.5m by the council to the government’s Levelling Up Fund. The planned ‘Reconnecting Croydon’ schemes will enable residents and visitors to enjoy the town centre’s public spaces and travel more easily through safer, greener and more pleasant routes.

Among the changes in the planning stages are, improved routes around the busy Old Town area, which includes Croydon Minster; more roadside greenery with a new pedestrian crossing and closure of the subway in Wellesley Road; new bus priority lanes and investment in the public realm at East Croydon; enhanced routes and public spaces in West Croydon; and Croydon’s busy shopping district, from South End to North End, will have improved walking routes, public realm and wayfinding. These projects will be a huge boost for our town centre and will help to restore pride in our borough.

As part of my priority to steer Croydon town centre's recovery I continue to work closely with businesses and partners through the Mayor’s Advisory Town Centre Board to bring forward the redevelopment of the Whitgift Centre and the wider regeneration of the town centre.

This year will also see the creation of a new Regeneration and Visioning strategy created by Croydon Council, which will underpin the town centre’s regeneration. As part of this work, we are currently engaging with the borough’s community groups, residents and businesses, who will be key to shaping the vision and strategy. We have appointed a multi-disciplinary team led by consultants ‘We Made That’, drawing together experts in urban strategy, design and infrastructure, to create an exciting and varied programme of community-led activities, which kicked off at the end of last year and will continue to into Spring.

These include schools and family workshops, connecting younger and older generations through workshops in storytelling, poetry and music, so we can better understand how they experience Croydon town centre, creating easy read guides for the strategy and regeneration and a symposium discussing how to make the town centre more accessible.

It is my priority for Croydon to become a vibrant place for people to live, work and visit and it’s really important to me that while shaping what that might look like for now and the future vision, that all the borough’s voices are heard.

The community engagement for the strategy is being supported by Croydon Urban Room, a project we launched last year to create a space where residents, businesses and partners can come together through conversations, stories, exhibitions and events, to develop clear priorities and help shape proposals for the town centre. Urban Room is part of Croydon’s Growth Zone Programme – a partnership between Croydon Council, the Mayor of London and Transport for London (TfL) – to support sustainable growth in the town centre and projects to deliver regeneration.

Visit the Urban Room website: www.croydonurbanroom.com