Forest Gate
Overview
Newham High Streets is a new initiative that aims to develop a delivery plan for Newham's high streets to help them in their recovery. As part of the first phase of Newham High Streets, we will be developing a plan for delivering projects and programmes in Forest Gate. This delivery plan will be developed based on evidence and co-design with the local community. We want to work with you, the people who live, work, and visit Forest Gate, to identify a set of principles, potential projects, and partnerships that will help guide future investment.
Developing an evidence base
In preparation to working with you and to better understand Forest Gate’s high street, we have commissioned ‘We Made That’, an architecture and urbanism practice with specialist knowledge on high streets, to carry out a place-based appraisal of Forest Gate. The appraisal was structured along six key themes: People & Community, Economy & Work, Development & Placemaking, Civic & Participation, Environment & Climate, and Health & Wellbeing.
On this page, you can also find the summary of the appraisal report for Forest Gate. The information included in the report is based on existing Council and greater London data (secondary data), as well as primary data collected through site visits and interviews with local businesses in May and June 2020. Read the appraisal report here.
Working Together
We have put together a summary of recent engagements that have taken place in the area, which you can read here. Moving forward, we have planned a series of online events, including a survey, a participatory exercise, and virtual workshops, which will help us understand the current situation of Forest Gate’s high street and plan its future together. The goal is to create a set of guiding principles for the high street along with a selection of potential projects that will help fulfil these principles. At the moment there is no funding available to realise some of these ideas. After the plan development, we will be actively seeking funding to deliver the projects over time and work together to prioritise any funding that becomes available.
How to use this platform:
We will use this space to invite you to actively contribute in many different ways to the development of the delivery plan for the high street and to inform you about the progress of the project. Only the current stage is open for contributions, but you can also review past engagements and see what is coming up in the future.
How else can you engage with the Newham High Streets programme in Forest Gate:
You can also email us at newhamhighstreets@newham.gov.uk and add ‘Forest Gate’ on the email’s subject line. You can also keep up to date via the council's social media pages on Facebook , Twitter, and Instagram. You can also call us at: 08008611424, from Monday to Thursday, between 11.00 - 16.00.
Phases
Ideas organisation & mapping
We would just like to thank each and every one of you for attending our online meetings, completing our survey, and spreading the word about the Newham High Streets programme! We’ve had 500 people responding to our survey and about 100 people attending our four online meetings. We appreciate your support and continued participation over the last quarter.
As promised, you can see below the results from the survey, the early draft list of projects that came through the survey, along with the presentation slides and Q&A from the online meeting for Forest Gate that we held on 23rd of November.
Survey Results Draft Project Ideas List Online Meeting Slides Online Meetings' Q&A
During this period, we will continue to organise all of the ideas that came through the survey, the online meetings, and emails with ideas you’ve sent us. We are working on mapping them and creating a list of key ideas, some of which will work in the short term and some in the longer term. After we organise and map the list of ideas, we will put them here on the Newham Co-create platform for residents, businesses, and local groups in Forest Gate to vote and comment on them. During that time, we will also host a series of more targeted online meetings with local groups and organisations to evaluate the ideas. If you are a local organisation, group or business operating in or around Forest Gate’s high street (Woodgrange Rd, Upton Ln, Romford Rd) please do not hesitate to email us at: newhamhighstreets@newham.gov.uk.
Upcoming and ongoing events
Past events
Event date: November 23rd, 2020 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.
Online