Townscape Heritage Initiative

Introduction

A proposed Townscape Heritage Initiative (THI) is part of the overall Stornoway regeneration strategy, and aims to facilitate regeneration by using conservation of the historic built environment as the main driver.

A THI is an initiative supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) that seeks to use conservation of the built environment to secure the economic regeneration of an area. The Comhairle, with support from Western Isles Enterprise, made a Stage 1 submission to the HLF for a THI in Stornoway in 2004. Approval in principle to the Stage 1 bid was given at the end of 2004 securing the largest conditional award in Scotland (£1.2m). The Initiative is a two-stage process; the second stage working up proposals in more detail from the first phase approval. Having received a conditional approval, the Comhairle has now submitted a final bid to secure Heritage Lottery Fund support and hopes to hear in March 2006 regarding the outcome.

A THI can only be approved in a conservation area or an area that is about to be declared a Conservation Area. As the Stornoway Outstanding Conservation Area is quite extensive it was considered, in submitting the bid, that a smaller area should be selected; hence a smaller focus area was chosen. This comprises the main commercial area of the town and will permit the initiative to be more concentrated.

The bid is made up of four key elements:

• critical projects
• a property grants scheme
• public realm works
• complementary initiatives

Download a map of the Stornoway Outstanding Conservation area and THI focus area in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (231K).

The bid was successful and in April 2006 the Comhairle was awarded the largest grant in Scotland in that round of awards (£1.2m) from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The total funding package, made up by the Comhairle, Highlands and Islands Enterprise Innse Galle, the Heritage Lottery Fund, and Historic Scotland, amounts to £2.2m.

Although most of the arrangements were in place by that time contractual issues prevented the Comhairle from officially starting the project until 2007. The project was launched by the Comhairle in February 2007. Rapid progress has been made in getting things underway and in its press release of 17 September the Comhairle the Comhairle announced that one of the major projects (Repaving of Cromwell Street) would commence shortly. You can follow progress on each of the projects by clicking on the index items on the left hand side of this page.

A short leaflet is available by post, or collection from the Comhairle offices, which sets out a brief description of the project.