Working with Ards and Down Council and AECOM we created a vision and masterplan for Bangor that has now received over £62 million in City Deal funding.
The starting point was to make Bangor into a destination of choice, as a place to live, visit and work.
Paramount was bringing out the essence of Bangor and reinforcing its connection to the sea and landscape. Embracing societal directions of travel, whereby new generations are increasingly enjoying re-discovering coastlines closer to home (partly driven by sustainable / environmental thinking), the ever growing wellbeing movement and the evolution and re-balancing of town centres from a retail focus to embrace more leisure and social activities.
This understanding of the essence of Bangor has come from deep and widespread engagement with a wide demographic of residents, visitors, businesses, and stakeholders. Over 2,000 people completed an in-depth survey.
The masterplan proposes a necklace “braid” of enhancements to the waterfront, creating a two-mile stretch of curated, high quality public realm. The aim of this is to lay the foundation of an attractive waterfront route centered around the key aspirations of the vision with a series of targeted public realm and place-making initiatives that help to uplift the Waterfront route, reconnecting people to the sea and enabling more people to enjoy and Bangor as a whole.
The necklace: the Public Realm Framework – As the two-mile stretch of Waterfront is very diverse in character and nature, we have identified five different character areas for the public realm framework, drawing upon the existing variations in setting, landscape, topography, activities, roles, and functions within Bangor.