Your Liberal Democrat Councillors are pressing for protection of our historic High Street shops and market.
We hear quite a lot about the thousands of visitors coming to High Wycombe with the opening of Eden. I’m sure we will have a lot of new visitors to the shopping centre
However let’s not forget about our traditional High Street shops and Market. Despite numerous requests we are not seeing investment in this area ahead of the opening of Eden.
It had been suggested that footfall will drop in this area of the town despite the opening of Eden. We are also told the opening of Eden will bring new shoppers to the town. No one really knows—this is concerning!
We need to understand the dynamics and shopping patterns of the High Street now to be able to manage the dynamics and changes to retail and shopping patterns in this area.
Since August 2007 we have been promised that the High Street shopping footfall patterns would be monitored . This is supposed to be managed by the town centre video cameras.
December 2007 and we are still waiting for the tracking of shoppers to be done. If it is not running by early January 2008 its going to be too late to collect robust shopper data.
Why do we need to track the footfall?
There is concerns that if the trade drops off in the High Street that the shops and market traders businesses would suffer. No one in Wycombe would want to see a situation where we find our unique shops and markets under financial pressure and be accused of Eden killing off local businesses. Wycombe would lose some of its uniqueness. We need to be in a position to track and monitor the changes so we can request that our council make necessary changes to protect this part of our shopping heritage.
Your Liberal Democrat Councillors are posing questions — when will the shopper footfall tracking be in place.
To date we have not been given a date.
