Our City Centre York Vision

View the Our City Centre Vision (previously name My City Centre Vision) for York.

The Vision will now be adopted as a guide to investment in the centre and will help to inform policy decisions.

A delivery strategy for the Vision will be prepared, which sets out how the Vision will be brought to life. This will be brought to a future Executive meeting in 2025.

These pages provide a summary of the 'themes' covered by the Our City Centre York Vision, which covers:

• a family friendly and affordable city centre
• an attractive and active city centre
• a sustainable city fit for the future
• making tourism work for York
• embracing our riverside
• a safe city centre which is welcoming and accessible to all
• thriving businesses and productive buildings
• celebrating heritage and making modern history

Creating a vibrant city centre for York

We want to create a vibrant city centre, and a city centre that can adapt to change. The most important aspect of this, is people.

People create the noise, soul and life of a city, and crucially, the captive audience for businesses to thrive.

People, or footfall, is the key to a successful place. When footfall and vibrancy drop, fewer services and shops can be supported, vacancies rise and employment falls.

A vibrant and popular place will attract people and support shops and services for our residents. By influencing how and when the city centre is used, and adapting key spaces, we can manage this better and optimise the benefits for all.

York is an amazing place that people want to visit, and tourism is a key component of our economy. But first and foremost our city centre exists to serve the needs of our residents. By focusing our Vision on ensuring the city centre is in the best place it can be, for our residents and communities that live here, the visitors that support the economy and sustain our shops, markets, restaurant and jobs will follow.

Background

After listening to your views as a vital part of the Our City Centre York project, a draft Vision shaping the future of York’s city centre was produced. This was shared with residents and businesses for feedback in 2021.

Following this, the Our City Centre Strategic Vision was approved by the Council’s Executive in November 2021. See a summary of the decisions made at the 18 November Executive meeting, or view a recording of the 18 November Executive meeting online.

Since then, we've adopted 3 significant 10-year strategies which are:

• the Climate Change Strategy
• the Health and Wellbeing Strategy
• the Economic Strategy

In addition, we've adopted a new Council Plan. To align to the city strategies and Council Plan priorities, the Vision for the city centre was re-launched in October 2023 as the “Our City Centre Vision.”

This updated the 8 themes to have a stronger focus on:

• accessibility
• residents
• affordability
• equalities
• climate resilience
• carbon reduction

Next steps

In October 2024, the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority approved funding from the Mayoral Investment Fund to develop a delivery strategy, which will set out how the vision will be brought to life.

Keep up-to-date with Our City Centre York; follow @OCCYork on our social media channels.

Also see

• Our City Centre York Engagement