Design your perfect Dorking town centre for the year 2050
What would your perfect Dorking town centre look like? Create a map or picture of your Vision for a future Dorking. Explain your ideas by writing a short document to go with it. Be bold with your ideas!
Here are a few things to think about:
- What will we all want and need from Dorking town centre in the future?
- Which features of Dorking would you like to preserve?
- Are there any places you would bulldoze to make way for new features?
- What kinds of shops and services (hairdressers, libraries, etc.) will we need? During Covid-19, many people turned to online shopping with home delivery. Shops were already suffering because of the rise in online shopping. Will we still want bookshops, banks, places to try on clothing, somewhere to buy a bag of nails and to buy food?
- Where will you meet up with friends and catch up on the gossip? Cafes, parks, sports centres?
- How important are green spaces as places to help us all relax and connect with nature?
- Town centre shopping malls, like the Swan Centre in Horsham, are under weatherproof roofs. Could we make Dorking town centre, or parts of it, more weatherproof by putting a cover over it? Should we put a glass roof over, say, the High Street?
- Covid-19 caught us all unaware and most buildings were not designed with social distancing in mind. Can we make the layout of future streets and shopping centres more pandemic-proof in case it happens again? Perhaps wider walkways at school entrances and around buildings?
- Getting around – some cities have outdoor escalators to help people get up and down steep hills. Would an escalator be helpful in Dorking? If so, where would you put it?
- Technology is changing fast, so think ahead. For instance, will we still need car parks or just landing pads for flying taxi and delivery drones? All these things are being developed by engineers around the world.
The future of Dorking is in your hands!
