How sustainability and community-led activations can drive the retail recovery

High streets and shopping spaces are constantly evolving to cater to the changing demands of the local workforce, visitors and residents who use them. A carefully curated and well-balanced offering that embraces a blend of leisure, retail, hospitality and culture, can be the key to unlocking a unique identity for an area. However, there is a growing demand for experience-led spaces that offer a point of difference. A solution to this can be found in purposeful pop-up meanwhile spaces that serve to create relevant, yet engaging and exciting experiences that allow for something unexpected in traditional spaces.

While ‘meanwhile’ use offers practical and obvious solutions, changed priorities since the pandemic and our burgeoning social and environmental consciousness have created opportunities for more innovative solutions to activate spaces that can truly revitalise destinations. There is now the space to promote necessary sustainability and community-driven initiatives that evoke a greater sense of purpose. A common approach is to transform retail spaces into greener areas, something that is now happening across the globe, for instance in the previously vacant Vanke Times Centre in Beijing, China, which now features a bamboo forest meditation garden.

At the Fleet Street Quarter BID and in partnership with Square Mile Farms, we are pioneering this approach in the UK with the recent pop-up Urban Farm. Using technology from Square Mile Farms, self-watering hydroponic towers and walls have produced around 1,000 supermarket-sized salad bags of ultra-fresh greens. Free and open to all, 109 Fleet Street invited the community to harvest produce grown. During its pilot, an otherwise under-utilised space saw nearly 500 green-fingered locals come in and harvest their own parsley, kale, sage and basil. All produce grown is zero mileage and highly sustainable. Greens grown at the Urban Farm could be harvested every two weeks and used 90% less water than traditional methods, costing just 43p of electricity a day.

To add further value to the experience and create even more of a focus on community involvement, Fleet Street Quarter’s Urban Farm also hosted a series of health-boosting and sustainable workshops. Conversations around the importance of sustainability in the City were facilitated through interactive and engaging health-boosting sessions such as low-emission pesto workshops, using produce grown directly from Fleet Street. We welcomed new audiences to the quarter. Schools and charities visited 109 Fleet Street to learn about the value of locally grown produce and we also partnered with local cafes to use the produce in their lunchtime offerings.

Workshops and interactive opportunities are essential to meet increasing demand for experience-led spaces, and the interest from the overall community displays that. In its first week, more than 200 people visited the Urban Farm and it was the longest stop on the recent Ecocity World Summit 2023 walking tour. Innovative and sustainable solutions to utilising ground floor retail spaces have proven to be key measures in fostering environmental and community stewardship and allow for the stimulation of a progressive and lively district.

Through an engaging and forward-thinking approach, retail (and other ground-floor spaces) can support sustainable and connected destinations. Our Urban Farm exhibits this through the creation of an unexpected but purposeful educational hub that connects communities and stimulates conversations around environmental issues. Alternative solutions to empty retail units have the capacity to release untapped potential in a destination that can stimulate further long-term opportunities to create more inclusive community focused and sustainable reimagined urban environments.