Building a future for Holbeach . . . then Spalding

Over the last four years, I have spent a lot of time pulling together, with help from county and district officers, various strategies and surveys to evidence the need for investment in Holbeach on the back of massive future investment in the nearby Food Enterprise Zone, that will bring jobs and generate future income in the town itself.

Work on the first building, the University of Lincoln’s new Food Centre of Excellence, is due to commence this summer, with further planning applications in the pipeline.

To the people of Spalding, over the next four years, using our experience and enthusiasm from the Holbeach project, it is our intention to focus on Spalding Town Centre, putting much needed investment into this wonderful market town to increase footfall and make it the vibrant town that it is capable of being.

In Holbeach, people often comment on why the need for a retail analysis of the town, movement analysis, retail and leisure study, a transport study and most recently as a pilot study for the Extensive Urban Survey. The point of it becomes clear when we apply to grant funding bodies who are based in London, Nottingham or Birmingham, who do not even know where Holbeach is, let alone understand how it functions. So we have to provide this evidence to give them a complete picture of the town, its good points and the not so good.

I am therefore delighted that South Holland District Council agreed to put Holbeach forward for the much vaunted High Street Fund on the back of all the evidence of need for investment. We have our eye on other government funding for Spalding, but we need to build the evidence there first. Now we have to wait until the end of the summer to find out whether we have been successful.

Any project of this sort has to be a real team effort. In Holbeach, the county and district council officers showed real enthusiasm for the project and Heritage Lincolnshire, the parish council and Holbeach Civic Society have all contributed.