News Archive - National High St Project
The National High Street Project was originally planned as a research project looking at how the High Street had changed over time but came to a holt with the onset of Covid and the lockdown. The project was resurrected and rolled out as a National Research Project under the auspices of the National Research sub-committee (NRSC) with the aim of producing a landmark report for the U3A 40th Anniversary in 2022.
It was clear that our high streets changed due to the effects of the Covid pandemic. This project looked to track and record those changes. Small groups from u3as carried out a survey of their own High Street in September 2020 to capture the pre-pandemic state of Britain's shopping locations. This was repeated some months later to see how locations had changed. A full report looking in depth at the impact of the pandemic on the high street was planned to be published in early 2022.
Sleaford U3A signed up to be part of this important and worthwhile project. Our volunteers chose a small number of shopping streets and walked along them noting down three items of data about each property: street number, name and type of business. Along with photographing the shopfront. Volunteers uploaded the list for their street, along with property type codes to the project team.