Lancaster BID’s Clean Up Continues
The Lancaster BID are constantly working to improve our city centre and clean up our streets, making the area a nicer place to be for both businesses and visitors.
There are many new initiatives in place. They recently appointed Castlegate Security as “BID Ambassadors”. The BID Ambassador spends 16 hours each week in the city centre helping with issues such as shop lifting, disturbances and ASBO breeches. One of their tasks is to report any “grot spots” to the BID and bring any maintenance issues to light.
City centre businesses rely on foot fall and it is important that Lancaster is a clean, safe and idyllic place to visit. The “Fix My Street” campaign was brought in a few months ago to make reporting problems to the council quicker and more user friendly. The scheme allows users to report, view and discuss local problems such as graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, pot holes and street lighting.
Similarly, back in January the BID supported the councils’ project to provide more cleaning hours per week, to include gum-busting duties and weed clearing. They also implemented a deep clean of the city centre following completion of the Square Route re-surfacing works.
More recently, the BID have been working with Lancaster City council to keep Chancery Lane clear of litter and a group of volunteers from Lancaster University Students Union have been brought in to help paint the walls along its length. In future months they would like to improve the lighting and by adding signage hope to encourage more pedestrians to use Chancery Lane as a viable route. In turn this will help to displace the current undesirable behaviour taking place there.
Finally, last month, it was good to see the beautiful BID planters in bloom returned to the steps of Lancaster City Museum in Market Square.
Liz Hickingbotham, Manager of the BID explained “We’ve been working very hard to make Lancaster a safer, cleaner and nicer place to visit, All the businesses in the BID area and city centre rely on foot fall and ultimately improvements to the streets mean an improvement in visitor numbers too, which is what we all want”.
Full details on all the Lancaster BID’s initiatives to clean up Lancaster can be found on their website lancasterbid.org