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Newhaven’s Wayfinding and Signage Spatial Masterplan
Cover page of final report © Credit Lewes District Council
Newhaven has a commitment to creating an inclusive environment by ensuring that all aspects of an area’s wayfinding and signage are carefully investigated and planned.
Newhaven is a small East Sussex port town with a population of 13,000 people lying at the mouth of the River Ouse. The local authority, Lewes District Council, received funding of just over £5mn from Government’s Future High Streets Fund (FHSF) and Newhaven Town Deal funding to ‘re-connect the Town’. The FHSF ‘Re-imagining Newhaven’ prospectus provides a foundation of baseline information, analysis and overarching themes to help deliver some big ideas and aspirations for the town.
The prospectus acknowledges Newhaven’s poor public realm and the fact that there’s little sense of arrival when entering the town from transport interchanges, and by the severance caused by the river, railway corridor, industrial estates and existing road network. The ring road known locally as ‘The Collar’ is a particular issue, effectively cutting off the town centre from its surroundings. Like many towns, a past emphasis on traffic planning and engineering has led to the dominance of cars, an infrastructure that does not lend itself to pedestrian or cyclist movements and a town centre that ‘turns its back’ on its surroundings.
Over time, notions of civic pride have eroded along with the quality of public realm, further diminishing the sense of place and amenity value. The furnishings and materials are repaired and added to in an ad hoc manner, leading to increased clutter and visual discontinuity.
One of the threads emerging from the prospectus is to improve wayfinding and access across Newhaven, to reconnect the town centre and the high street with key residential and business areas, increasing footfall and dwell time, while reducing traffic and improving air quality. Key to achieving this aim is to create clearer, more legible and engaging routes that simultaneously promote local identity and enhance public realm.
Reconnecting the town centre by improving connections to the high street
© Allen Scott
Lisa Rawlinson is Head of Regeneration at Lewes District Council. ‘The desire was to install new signage at key access points and gateways to the high street including from the railway station and through to riverside walks,’ she says. ‘This required a strategic approach to working out where to put this and what this might look like to help create something that reflected Newhaven’s unique characteristics.’
Lewes District Council engaged landscape architects, Allen Scott, to prepare a Wayfinding & Signage Spatial Masterplan for Newhaven, to deliver a pilot scheme for new visitor trails along the river, and to spark interest in Newhaven’s heritage.
‘As landscape architects, we wanted the spatial masterplan to be a comprehensive approach to wayfinding and signage for the whole town, taking a holistic and spatial view of movement and inclusive access and to use it to deliver some of the emerging ideas for the town,’ says Marc Tomes, Allen Scott’s Director.’ Ultimately, the Spatial Masterplan needed to improve people’s experience, making the town easy, safe, convenient and attractive for people to find their way around and to spend more time there.’
Following contextual analysis, the project team undertook consultation with a number of key stakeholders including East Sussex County Council, Newhaven Enterprise Zone and Newhaven Town Council. This framed a structured methodology based around four steps involving research and site visits, targeted workshops and presentations and initial conceptual illustrations of potential outcomes.
The ethos behind the Spatial Masterplan went far beyond considering replacement signage. It resulted in helping to set the scene for vital and necessary improvements to the public realm across Newhaven.
The content of the masterplan covered town-wide wayfinding principles, locations for wayfinding and signage improvements and better visual language and potential materials. Using these principles, the team then defined specific improvements in key locations across the town and prepared an action plan.
Newhaven railway station, one of the key gateways into Newhaven
© Allen Scott
Says Rawlinson, ‘The project highlighted to us all that wayfinding isn’t just about signs. It’s about how people experience a place or a journey.’
Combining these concepts demonstrated that the experience of a ‘place’ involves a number of factors, including the physical environment of the public realm and the elements and activities within it. Together these provide both intuitive and informative navigation, leading to a better sense of that place. This leads to connections that are more positive between people, places and each other, encouraging active and healthy lifestyles and reducing air pollution through a reduction in car use.
‘The ethos behind the Spatial Masterplan went far beyond considering replacement signage. It resulted in helping to set the scene for vital and necessary improvements to the public realm across Newhaven,’ says Rawlinson.
‘We kept coming back to the town’s distinct character, a juxtaposition of marine, coastline, countryside and industry within such a small geographic area, and our desire to reflect and respect this in our design response,’ says Tomes. ‘We felt it was important to ensure the essence of Newhaven, its history and evolution, for better or for worse, was not lost to homogeneity but that emerging projects and actions followed principles to preserve the character while enhancing the amenity of the local community and visitors alike. The pragmatic starting point, though, was that the current quality of the public realm and amenity spaces is poor with tired infrastructure in need of investment.’
Contextual analysis included spatially mapping baseline information
© Allen Scott
Before embarking on the action plan, the team sought to gain a deeper understanding of how people currently make their way through the town and to what extent these could be rationalised and improved. Primarily through personal observations, available visitor data, footfall data and consultation, Allen Scott analysed the various visual cues and physical elements such as public realm furnishings materials, signage, public art, vegetation, buildings and infrastructure that impart the current ‘sense of place’ and amenity value to help unpick the challenges and inform potential solutions. In Newhaven’s favour is its geography, topography, river, coast and proximity to the South Downs National Park, which all help with intuitive orientation. Long views towards the town centre and the river from the east, west and south and panoramic views from Castle Hill and the fort provide a valuable sense of where you are within the wider landscape. The town centre and high street currently suffers from severance to the river, the coast, the South Downs National Park and to its residents. The analysis reinforced outcomes and recommendations from previous studies to improve the navigation and connectivity for all abilities and all ages. This included enabling ease of movement and connections for people who are visually impaired.
Opportunities identified include improved gateways, routes and places to stop across Newhaven
© Allen Scott
Applying best-practice principles to this analysis with more specific principles for Newhaven provided two overarching directions, better arrival and destinations and better routes and pause points. Derived from the research and discussions, the team then applied four themes to assist in formulating specific projects and actions. These were: re-imagining the sense of arrival into Newhaven; reconnecting the town centre; reestablishing relationships between land, river and sea; and repurposing under-utilised spaces. Best practice principles include wayfinding that’s inclusive, relatable, simple and legible. Newhaven’s town-wide principles include wayfinding that is well-placed and integrated, consistent and coordinated, and in the context of the Towns Fund and FHSF improved wayfinding could also act as a catalyst for further enhancements and positive change.
Conceptual ideas for a family and a hierarchy of bespoke signage
© Allen Scott
Under these themes, 33 projects were identified and organised, each one located and described with a number illustrated and expanded upon. Importantly, the Spatial Masterplan included a series of recommended actions to help deliver it. These include strategic and aspirational improvements such as major enhancements to the Transport Interchange Hub (ferry, train, bus interchange) through to quick wins of decluttering and rationalising signage and furnishings. There are also recommended overarching actions and projects such as gathering coherent content about Newhaven, its past and present, and formatting this in a way so it is easy to use for future information boards, website information and public realm enhancements. Grouping the actions into the four themes enabled the team to demonstrate how specific issues can be resolved through physical improvements, although many proposals also deliver multiple themes and benefits. Priority ‘early win’ pilot schemes were identified that would deliver the objectives set for the project as well as objectives set within the Town Investment Plan. Working with Newhaven Historical Society, a heritage interpretation trail has been created along the River Ouse. The new bespoke information boards reflect the visual language and materials palette of Newhaven. They also include QR codes linked to further information about Newhaven and its heritage.
Principles, overarching directions and themes for application help deliver a reconnected Newhaven
© Allen Scott
Says Rawlinson: ‘The Spatial Masterplan includes several ambitious “Big Idea” projects aimed at addressing issues that go far beyond just wayfinding.’
Prioritising projects for the longer term is challenging without further planning, design and engagement with stakeholders. To assist with this, the report included an assessment toolkit to help council officers and their partners prioritise projects based on success criteria.
The Spatial Masterplan sets out an ambitious and holistic way to deliver improved wayfinding across Newhaven over time. Some projects will take far longer to deliver than others, but the more complex projects are broken down into a series of smaller manageable projects to simplify staged delivery.
Conceptual ideas for improving one of the key gateways by applying the Spatial Masterplan principles, direction and themes
© Allen Scott
It was not the purpose of the project or the report to propose a complete ‘materials and furniture palette’ for Newhaven. However, in the interest of steering a consistent and coherent approach to future public realm improvements and wayfinding interventions, the Spatial Masterplan report included the principles applicable to material specification.
Conceptual illustration of a ‘Pause point’, applying Newhaven’s family of signage and materials
© Allen Scott
The report also insists that integrated sustainable approaches to design, specification, implementation, ongoing management and maintenance are part of the solutions, actions and interventions. This includes sustainably sourced products and materials, environmentally sensitive designed solutions that provide benefits to biodiversity and climate action, integration of appropriate vegetation to help with air quality control and reduce the heat-island effect, potential for sustainable drainage solutions such as rain gardens, swales and permeable paving and information and interpretation that explains climate change and the biodiversity crisis.
Newhaven’s Wayfinding and Signage Spatial Masterplan was adopted by Lewes District Council and signed off by the Town Deal board in 2022. An initial pilot scheme is due to be implemented this summer.
Marc Tomes is Director of Allen Scott and a High Street Task Force Expert. He has more than 20 years’ experience working within the landscape and environment sector in the UK, Australia and New Zealand
