Enhancing Canterbury High Street with Sustainable and Inclusive Design

Client

Canterbury City Council

The Project

Canterbury High Street’s long-awaited revitalisation project saw the installation of public seating and landscaping to create a community hub in the centre of a bustling thoroughfare.

Contacted initially by the Canterbury City Council, Furnitubes was tasked with reinvigorating a highly-pedestrianised area to create a welcoming space for residents to stop and linger. This included the planned inclusion of seating and planters around five mature trees that provided much-needed shade and biodiversity to the high street.

The council required help establishing radius modules to allow for S and circle shaped seating underneath tree cover, without disturbing the long-established roots, and to minimise maintenance of seating for as long as possible. The trees were to be given pride of place in the planning, building seating around them so that the people who frequented the high street could benefit from their shade and loveliness.

Outcome

The seating provides much-required spaces to stop and rest underneath some of Canterbury’s natural beauty, and is easily maintained for minimal service interruption.

And, as a result of those modular seating arrangements, the area has become a place of pause and refuge for those going about their day.

Residents of the area who were long used to the old High Street have taken to using it as their resting place, with Uber drivers settling to wait for orders from nearby places underneath the shade of the trees.

Shoppers, heavy with bags, said, “It’s our favourite part of the town centre regeneration, we like being able to take a break from shopping outside. The area is used so much more with the added seating. We often arrange to meet each other on one of the benches”.

A lady who works there in a nearby shop added, “I like to come out here on my lunch break and watch the world go by”, a sentiment that is echoed by residents and workers within the location.