Q3: Enterprise Zone

Aim: Cost:

Transform the town centre facade and infrastructure to support and encourage enterprise and revive town centre living to drive footfall into the town, nurture and grow Stranraer’s economy and create new employment and entrepreneurship opportunities.

£1.5 million in total for The Big Makeover and Revive projects.

• Town Makeover: Transform the high street, supplementing the town’s Shopfront Improvement Scheme to support the town’s independent shops with colourful paint schemes and awnings over shops; apply decorative vinyls to windows of vacant buildings; commission murals for gap sites and buildings; remove weeds from roofs and facades. Improve wayfinding. Make derelict properties safe. Improve routes into town centre.

• Revive: Town Centre Living: Animate the town centre. Audit vacant and derelict land and properties. Work with landlords, agents and developers to explore opportunities to inject life into the town centre. Develop mixed use sites and schemes for business, enterprise and housing. Offer ‘meantime opportunities’ - short term, low cost leases - in the town centre for entrepreneurs and artists, de-risking start-ups, growing the creative community. Create a community chest to help with low cost, self-build makeovers in vacant shops for selfemployed, social enterprises and small businesses, working with the Furniture Project to reuse material.

• Industrial Park: keep heavy lifting enterprise in this secondary, out of town zone. Move Stena’s lorry parks here. Improve safe Active Travel routes to the expanded Furniture Project site. Invest in green energy to power community assets. Attract high value manufacturing.

• Vacant/derelict sites: audit and act to save significant historical buildings from ruin.

Q4: Sanctuary

Aim:

Develop unused land along the Black Stank burn as a 20-acre wellbeing sanctuary, protecting and promoting blue-green life. Sanctuary meets historically oft-polluted Stank: it’s already affectionately referred to as Stanctuary.

Cost:

£500,000 for Sanctuary Outdoor Nursery: use nature to nurture, provide jobs and support parents to return to work.

£300,000 to develop Dick’s Hill Hub growing/food project to trail the way for the Sanctuary.

• Outdoor nursery: Support locals back into work by providing childcare. Dumfries & Galloway College provide training qualifications in childcare. Stanctuary nursery provide placements, work experience and jobs in childcare.

• Adventure Playground: creative, adventurous, outdoor play centre for a wide range of ages, growing physical and mental wellbeing, developing confidence and skills, learning about risk, reducing risky behaviours, building strong community resilience.

• Tonic: Wild Wellness: work with neighbouring community hospital and groups like Drug & Alcohol Partnership to offer zones, spaces and structures for people in recovery, Wild Wellness projects, Men’s Sheds for mental health promotion. Build intergenerational volunteering and skill-sharing. Teach self-build skills to create spaces working with material from the Community Reuse Shop.

• Dick’s Hill Hub: Community Asset Transfer of vacant building in Dick’s Hill to support families and grow skills and confidence to get into work. Shared community tenancy to develop growing and community, linked to the Sanctuary site. Work with local residents as community catalysts, sharing space and growing food knowledge and cooking skills. Link the Hub with Moveable Feast, a growing and food projects across the Rhins and linked to a regional and national Food Futures movement, a potential partner in the South West for Glasgow School of Art’s Forresbased Rural Food Futures Lab.

• Active Travel: develop routes and paths through the sanctuary for walking and cycling as part of the town’s broader Active Travel scheme.