Welcome to the Market Towns Retail Distinctiveness Toolkit that has been developed for IGNITE as part of One North East's commitment to quality place making for market towns and sustainable communities.

The Toolkit has been devised to support both formal and informal organisations that wish to strengthen the ‘offer’ of their market towns in relation to the types of local shops and services, specifically to help meet local shopping needs, the use of local assets and to make them attractive as places to visit.

To help you understand how distinctive your town centre is, the Toolkit provides you with downloadable guidance notes and when you are ready to survey your town centre, a collection of survey forms which can be used to submit and store your results.  A range of data interpretation options will assist you with interpreting your data.

If you need to gather evidence in a systematic way about your town centre in order to build a case for improvement then use this tool.