Word of Mouth... Visit Hitchin

Visit Hitchin, has a friendly, visible presence around town- on signage attached to flower displays, on vehicles and Ranger uniforms as the team keep the place looking its best, and above the doors of the information centre and shop on the corner of the Churchyard.

But what exactly is Visit Hitchin? How are they related to Hitchin BID? And what are they responsible for?

At the start of summer, Shout or Whisper met up with Town Centre Manager Tom Hardy at their offices, to get answers to these questions and other things you might be curious about- and along the way, found out how much Visit Hitchin does behind the scenes, and how the team manages to keep the town ticking along like clockwork.

Tom Hardy, Town Centre Manager. Credit: Visit Hitchin

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To start with, I wondered if you could go into a bit of detail on what is Visit Hitchin, what is Hitchin BID, how do they maybe differ, and what role do they play in the town?

So Hitchin BID stands for Business Improvement District- now, Business Improvement Districts are a government initiative, it’s a government idea that came around in 2004, taken from Canada and the States that started Business Improvement Districts, back in the 70s or 80s.

The idea is that you come up with a five-year business plan, you work with the businesses on this, you take each business’ rateable value and you look at adding a percentage, like a levy, on top of their business rates for additional services.

Every five years we create a new business plan and we work with the businesses for ten months- 628 businesses in the town centre- we consult with every single one of them over the course of the ten months, and we come up with a plan. Then the District Council on our behalf runs a vote, whether they want to pay an additional levy on top of their business rates for these additional services, or not. And if it’s above fifty percent, whether someone didn’t vote, voted “no” or voted “yes”, if it’s above fifty percent by a “yes” vote it goes through, everybody pays by law.

In Hitchin we know what the rateable values are for the whole of the town collectively, that includes everything with a rateable value, all the way from an advertising board on Hermitage Road all the way up to Waitrose supermarket. We have a levy of 2.2% for core town centre, that brings in our £320,000 BID levy which we use to deliver on this business plan.

The current BID business plan Visit Hitchin is delivering.

We’re an independent limited company. Nothing to do with the Council. But the Council do collect the levy for us on our behalf like they do the business rates. I think there’s a common misconception that business rates are retained locally, and actually the council get to keep 4p in every pound of business rates they collect, the rest goes to central government. And that 4p in every pound basically pays for the rates department to collect business rates. So essentially the council are just a vehicle for government to collect business rates, so there’s nothing really retained locally. Having a BID, and having that cash there- £320,000 is our baseline levy, we’ve also got the shop, we hire out pitches on Market Place, we hire out radios, do sponsorships, so it tops it up quite considerably.

We pay for all the Christmas lights out of that, pay for all the floral displays, all the events, we pay for the Ranger team- there’s three day Rangers that do graffiti removal, flyposting, and we’ve had an 85% increase in shoplifting so they are out dealing with a lot of issues- in fact we’ve dealt with three issues this morning, already. It’s a big thing, and having Rangers around is a good deterrent.

Essentially we work for the businesses. We run a joint bank account for them to make the town a better place.

We’ve got four recycling Rangers, we call them- we collect used cardboard and used coffee grounds from 270 business, 180 tonnes a year that we recycle in cardboard and about 150 tonnes of used coffee grounds each year, so it’s a huge operation. They’re out every single day, four of these guys in our electric van and electric buggy.

We’ve also got Danny Pearson, who was Council who we’ve brought over, so he’s full time. He’s Operations Coordinator, so he deals with Christmas lights and flowers and events as well- we oversee probably seventy, eighty events a year. And then we run quite a number of events in-house.

The thing with events is an interesting one- we have to approach it like a BID and not an events company. There’s a big difference with that. There’s a fine balance between what the businesses want and what the public want. For example our food festival- we run it from 10 ‘til 4. Now the public would want it ‘til midnight with a beer tent- our licenced venues would go absolutely mental at us if we did that. We don’t put a Christmas market on at Christmas, retailers strewn all over the place, for the very reason that we’re there to support local retailers and if we did that at the busiest time of the year… It’s finding the balance of increasing dwell time, bringing people into town to use the town because events are a draw, but not using those events to detract from spend in shops. That’s essentially the strategy.

Visit Hitchin is our outward, public facing brand. It’s exactly the same. We are Hitchin BID, trading as Visit Hitchin. And the reason for that is because nobody knows what a BID is, unless you explain it to them. People think there’s someone buying Hitchin.

We’ve only recently done that rebrand, we've done huge amounts of logo changes to uniforms, vans, there’s so much we’ve had to change. Even rebranded the shop so it’s now the Visit Hitchin shop. It’s a better brand for us.

I did an infographic when we were doing our renewal ballot on who does what to support the town.

We’ve just done a big deep clean of the town, we do a huge amount of work with local landlords as well on filling vacant units with the right people. And also getting grants for vinyl wrapping vacant units that are long term. So 9-10 High Street, that was Woolworths back in the day, Poundland and M&CO, that is not going to be let for a very, very long time because of certain issues- basically it’s not on the market. So we’ve got a grant to be able to put a load of vinyl wrapping across it to improve that.

Likewise with Halifax, the old TSB on Brand Street, a few on Hermitage Road. We’ve got a 1.6% vacancy rate and the national average is 14.4%, so we’re doing well as a town. And there’s a big difference between what’s vacant and what’s available. There’s very little available in the town.

There’s a common sort of misunderstanding when people see a vacant unit, they think “oh, no one wants it”. They absolutely do. The 9-10 High Street got probably four or five big national retailers wanting to take it and the landlord would say “no”. So there’s a lot of stuff that happens in the background that people don’t realise.

9-10 High Street, soon to be given a facelift while the units are vacant.

We run the VisitHitchin.com website, we also run the H-Cam [the livestream of Market Square]- a lot of interest in that when it started- and then we run the Facebook and Instagram platforms as well as… we subsidise, but Heather’s done such a fantastic job on it I don’t think we can call it subsidising any more, run the information centre. The money we make from Hitchin-branded goods actually goes a huge long way towards paying for the information centre itself. It’s a very rare thing in a town to have an information centre. Years ago they used to be everywhere but I think there’s only three in the whole county now.

We apply grant funding as well, for things like- we've just had the streets deep-cleaned and chewing gum removed, we’re changing all the wood along the benches in the town for new wood and having them repainted.

We recently started a new charity. Took us month’s to get over the line. We don’t have a town council, the District Council has no money at all, and so there really isn’t a formal mechanism for residents in Hitchin to be able to make financial contributions towards Hitchin. And there is actually quite a high demand out there, because a lot of people when they go to these events and see flowers or see lights or see projects happening in the town they thing “Oh good, the council’s doing something”, when they’re really not, it’s us. We’re doing it.

nobody knows what a BID is, unless you explain it to them. People think there’s someone buying Hitchin.

It’s educating people on the situation of place management in Hitchin and letting them know that if they want projects to happen there now is a place for them to go. There’s a lot of people out there, quite affluent people that are really keen to see projects get off the ground. We focus on six projects in there which we started focusing on in November.

We’re looking at the Riverside Walkway which is the bridge from Bridge Street to Hermitage Road, we’re looking at planting trees, we’re looking to take over the Charnwood House community facility next to the library, used to be the museum, we want to get an outdoor gym installed in Bancroft Gardens… I should know all of these by heart.

The biggest one is we want to open the Dell as an open air theatre again, that’s our big, big project. We’ve been doing quite a lot of work in the background on that, creating that as a permanent outdoor theatre space.

How long has the Dell been out of action? I’m sure there was a mini-revival not too long ago?

So it opened in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. It ran until- I think the last performance was 1999. It was opened for about three weeks by Hitchin Festival in 2019- no, not 2019, it was 2021. Because it was sort of Covid-y, we had to restrict numbers which made it a lot more expensive to run.

That’s what I’m thinking of.

But that was very temporary, temporary barriers. And that made it way more expensive than being run created as a proper theatre. That was really successful and it was used by loads of people.

And the final one is town centre improvement- that’s like repainting things in the town, resurfacing areas… an overarching thing to improve the town centre and the entrances into the town as well.

We do a lot of background work with the businesses, business breakfasts and constantly in contact with them. We have to be, because we work for them, and we have to keep a very close eye on the business plan, making sure we’re not deviating from it too much.

Thank you- that’s really cleared up in my brain how it all works. How did you get started in this kind of work, and what sort of background did you bring to it?

Uh…

You sound shocked that I would ask that.

No, no, no, I often wonder how I got to sitting here, to be honest. I started doing events at Hertford Castle. I was PA to the mayor of Hertford to start with, then started to do events for the whole of Hertford Castle.

And then… started getting into town centre things in Hertford, did a bit of consultancy work for Letchworth Garden City BID, and that then meant I took over as Town Centre Manager for Letchworth for two and half years. My predecessor here in Hitchin, who was in the position for twenty two years, retired- and then I took over from him, and I’ve been doing it for quite a few years now.

But I’ve got an acting background, I did acting A-Levels or BTEC Diploma at North Herts College, and then lived in Ghana for a while teaching performing arts in the jungle, which was bizarre. The only script I had was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and they’d never heard of snow, couldn’t even understand the concept of snow, so it was the weirdest thing to teach.

I taught dancing and acting out there for quite a while, and then moved all over. Lived in Turkey, lived in Colombia, and then got back and started to take life a bit more seriously.

I’ve written a bit as well. There’s one thing I’m really desperate to write. With town centres it all looks very nice and serene, like a swan as you go through town, and then backstage it’s chaos. Like “I can’t tell you” chaos. These guys are dealing with things on a daily basis that are the most bizarre things in the world. People will say “there’s a duck on the roof”, and they need to go and fix it. Or “the fountain's stopped working in the river, you need to wade in”-

[We're joined in the office by Operations Coordinator Danny Pearson and Town Centre Ranger Matt Ray, returning from duties around town.]

Danny Pearson, Operations Coordinator. Credit: HitchinTV

Tom: I’m just saying your job- what does your average day look like?

Danny: I don’t have an average day. No two days are the same.

Tom: What’s the most bizarre thing you think you’ve dealt with?

Danny: We had to fish a small mechanical toy out of the river.

Tom: We all thought that was a dead animal didn’t we?

Danny: I thought it was a dead cat. Erm… Rescuing birds out of shops. Or rescuing shopkeepers from birds.

Tom: Danny’s right now delivering rabbits to shops. [For an Easter trail]

Danny: Just another normal day.

Tom: And the fact we work for 600 very passionate, very loud businesses that have big opinions on what we do makes our job even more interesting.

I suppose you’re trying to please everyone?

Tom: I wouldn’t say please, I’d say you’re trying to piss the fewest people off, is what you’re doing. Sometimes people don’t see our strategy as we see it, and so it’s certainly difficult. But it’s exciting as well. It’s a private company, not a public company, so we can just be like “right, let’s come up with some new ideas for the town. Let’s just think of it.”

It is quite fun. Me and Danny will sit down in October and be like “right, let’s think about next year. What are we going to do?”

We’ve got a Soapbox Derby happening down Windmill Hill. Eyebrow raising stuff, eyebrow raising events I think are good. We’ve got wrestling, live wrestling on Market Square-

Matt: Looking more and more likely!

Tom: End of July.

Matt: 26th of July.

Tom: It’s just coming up with new ideas that are not competing so much with the businesses, that are exciting for the town.

But no, I’ve always thought a mockumentary for place management would just be brilliant. I’ve thought that for a while. There’s so many things, so many elements to it in the background. The Office style.

thousands of people sold their London apartments to buy what they could- a three bed, four bed, with a garden and a garage

Since you started doing this, has Hitchin or the local area changed, and if so, how?

Yeah, massively.  I mean, I started in 2018 and back then the demographic was a lot older. As soon as we got out of the first lockdown so many people, probably thousands of people, sold their London apartments to buy what they could- a three bed, four bed, with a garden and a garage and start a family in Hitchin or the surrounding areas. So we saw, we think around about an 8-9000 increase in London commuters buying up, so the house prices in Hitchin have been inflated and the demographic has reduced to very much young families now. We find that with events- events for young families- the Christmas light switch on- they are so much more well attended than they were before the pandemic.

Certain things have changed. People’s shopping habits have obviously changed as well. You’ll see- I mean- the best way of seeing what people’s shopping habits are is by seeing what shops you have left in a town. Because, it’s not a theme park- we’re not going to have shops there if people don’t spend money.

People on social media are talking about wanting the town to be like it was in the 1970s and the reality is if you paid £5 to get into the town, we could have our cobblers still there, if you like, but it’s not a museum, it’s a place to do business. We’ve seen a huge rise obviously in services, service industry and hospitality. But in terms of place, talking about this UK-wide, I’d say before the pandemic a town could comfortably run on 70% hospitality services against 30% retail. That’s probably changed now to around 20-15% retail, that can comfortably support the town. People don’t go to town for shopping any more, it’s secondary, most people come to the town to use a service or to eat or drink. If they have time left on their car or they want to wander around the town a little bit they will use retail, but generally people don’t go to a town now for shopping.

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t considered that- it makes sense when you say it.

But look, towns aren’t dying, they're evolving for what people spend money on. Unfortunately there are towns in the UK that are too big for that evolution. They’re still used but they’re probably twice too much for the commercial demand- there’s only so many services and hospitality you can cram into a town before it’s too much, it’s too diluted. We’re very lucky in Hitchin that we’ve got a lot of surrounding villages and good draw from ‘less desirable’ towns coming to Hitchin, so our footfall I think is inflated and higher because we get the tourist demographic as well as local residents.

So that’s how things have been- if you could cast your mind forward, and predict the next five, ten years, how do you see that it might change in those years? Will it continue doing the same?

Yeah, I mean look it’s going to continue evolving. We’re likely to see increases in our vacancy rate because of the challenges businesses have been going through. The unfortunate thing is that a business that has been here for five years has had to handle huge amounts of loss and debt from Covid, then huge amounts of loss from increases in interest rates and cost of living and everything going up, and now the government’s added increases in living wage, increases in insurance, so they’ve had to stomach this increase. As of today, this business that’s been here for five years has probably racked up a huge amount of debt unless they’ve been running a very, very successful business, but even then the margins are paper thin.

I think then we’ll see a churn of businesses turning over. There’s still a huge demand. I’m hoping that the Council will move quickly on the Churchgate shopping centre development, which I think will have a good impact on the town. I think we’re going to see more leisure facilities coming in. We’re just constantly adapting, really, to what businesses want. If they all came to us and said “We don’t like these events”, then we are obligated to scrap and change and move around, so we- we’ve got five directors of the company, and they’re voluntary directors and they’re all business owners in the town so that’s how it structurally works, and they represent different industries- independent retail, hospitality, offices, that sort of thing. They’ll feed back on what they feel we’re doing in terms of our outputs- and events is one of the main things because it’s out there in the street, and so we do have to make quite a lot of major changes.

Unfortunately there are towns in the UK that are too big for that evolution.

And demographic-wise, do you think it’s going to continue to skew younger? Are more people going to continue to come out of bigger cities still? Or has that shift sort of stopped?

I think the shift has slowed down, certainly, because of the inflation of house prices. You’re getting a certain type of young person coming out now- someone that is quite comfortable buying a million pound three-bed. A lot of people don’t have a million pounds to spend on a three-bed house, so we’re seeing that sort of London move pushing out to areas in Bedfordshire, further afield. People are more comfortable sitting on a train for forty minutes, for an extra ten minutes, to save £50,000 or £100,000 on a house. That’s not to say- y’know, I still think there’s a lot of affluent people living in the villages around Hitchin, but yeah I certainly think that the sort of rush to buy has slowed now.

You’ve touched on this a little bit- we are five years on since the first lockdown, I wondered if you could expand a little bit on how it affected what the BID does and how you navigated that first year of completely unknown- having to pause, having to stop.

Yeah, it was a bit of a panic really because all the businesses get their levy bills on 1st April.

Oh, god, okay.

And the Council don’t pay us until they’ve been paid by the businesses, we invoice for what they’ve had in. We’re a company that is running on quite high operational costs and when we locked down on the 23rd of March, I knew that in two weeks’ time all these bills were going to land on the doorsteps of businesses that essentially were saying “Well, I’m just going to hand the keys back to the landlord because we’re done.” This was before furlough came in.

When furlough did come in I used it as an opportunity to say, I’m going to just close up shop as much as possible to conserve our operational costs. Furloughed all the staff apart from myself, and I then spent the next few weeks, months, watching the Prime Minister every day and then translating that into what that meant for businesses, sending emails out. Probably taking fifteen to twenty phone calls a day from very, very desperate businesses- I mean like horrendously desperate businesses, trying to find grants for them to help them survive.

It eased a bit when furlough came in but then it became really complicated, and I remember having to try to become an expert every day on these different changes- whether it was traffic lights, whether it was what Tier you were in, whether you can open if you’re an essential business and what that means, what does “essential” mean? Are there loopholes? Ethically, should I go down that loophole? You know, there’s so many elements to it.

Technically a clothing shop could put some toilet roll in their window and open, back then. But ethically that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

And then some of them didn’t have any website, or any means of delivering online. So we started the Hitchin Basket. I mean, I- one of the biggest mistakes was furloughing all of the staff, because I didn’t realise that businesses still needed our services. So I spent a day cardboard collecting, and doing social media, and then sending emails out…

businesses that essentially were saying “Well, I’m just going to hand the keys back to the landlord because we’re done.”

But we did buy, very early on, a lot of PPE. Huge amounts, in fact this whole of my office was full, you couldn’t even walk in. We did reopening packs for businesses with safety signs, masks, hand sanitiser and stuff. We did a big reopening strategy, a load of events- in fact, we were the only town in the south of England to run a Christmas market in 2020. Which was the worst event I think we could ever have run- you know, one in one out, masks, they can’t stand and talk too long. The most un-Christmassy thing I’ve ever run.

But we ran it- and it helped businesses, people did spend money, so commercially it was a good thing. But it was very sterile. Which I suppose was a good thing, back then.

It was a horrendously turmoiled time. When I brought the staff back from furlough we were running a hundred miles an hour. We set up the Hitchin Basket I think within five days- and that was six hundred businesses all having their own profile on there. My concern was that businesses wouldn’t see us as relevant or see our value and wouldn’t pay out levy.

And it is a payment by law so eventually the Council would take them to court, but if you’re a business that’s got so many different people asking for money and you’ve not got any coming in then the levy is probably going to be quite low on your list. They did pay, in the end, we got 80% levy paid, and it’s because the staff, we all just clubbed together to try to make ourselves relevant. As soon as the lockdown came in we stopped all events, we were debating whether we put Christmas lights up- what’s the point if it’s going to be locked down?

We did go with a floral display, but very little. It was really such a weird time. Glad it’s behind us.

On the other side of it, are there any habits or outlooks from that period that carried forward into how you run things now? Or is it just a case of ‘let’s lock that door, and leave it where it was’?

No, no, certainly I think being more financially resilient as a company I think has come out of that. Because we’re a non-profit company we were kind of running down to fumes before the next tranche of BID levy came in, and it was always a bit like cold sweat in May hoping that people were going to pay. But we’ve built up a bit of a surplus now because we have so many operational costs, and also we’ve got quite a lot of big assets like the Christmas lights, the vans, we need to keep a surplus around- and in case something else comes along.

I think we’re more adaptable as a company now. More up for change. We sort of go along and think ‘this time of year we’ll get this, this time of year, that’ whereas hospitality now the patterns that they were seeing before the pandemic have sort of gone out the window. Which makes things difficult to plan, they might have a hundred covers on a Monday and they have to have a chef to cover them. But I think we’re certainly more adaptable now.

I’ve only got one more question, and it is a slight change of topic- what do you and the rest BID team to do unwind, relax, and enjoy the local area?

Tom: [to Matt and Danny] I don’t know! What do you guys do at home?

Danny: Write comics…

I think I heard about this- you write for the Beano?

Danny: Yeah! I escape Hitchin town to Beano town once a week. But we’ve both [Danny’s indicating himself and Tom] got young families, I’ve got a two and a half year old, you’ve got a three year old and a… two month old?

Tom: She’s nine weeks now, yeah.

Danny: So free time…

Tom: So what I do to relax is a strange question! My relaxation is listening to the news in the car journey on the way home, that’s it. And then I’ll sit in the car for maybe thirty seconds just sort of psyching myself up ready to go into the house- and then I’m in! Then I’m in!

What about you, Matt, what do you do to relax?

Matt: I mean mine are a bit older, they’re nine and twelve, but much the same scenario- that ten, fifteen minute drive home is the highlight of the day. Music on, and relax as I drive. “Oh, there’s traffic! Never mind.”

Danny: It’s a nice commute in though. You know, when you come in, you know you’re coming here and it really is the heart of the town.

Matt: Yeah, it is.

Danny: And you don’t know what’s going to happen on a day, it’s quite exciting. You’ve got a list of stuff, “Yeah, I’m going to do this”- and then you look at it at the end of the day and you go “I’ve only done two things”. But because other stuff that’s important has happened, yes, we need to address it. It’s fun.

Tom: It is! Like, two days ago we had the piano- we’ve put a piano in the Arcade. It’s a community piano, kids are playing on it. We had a huge influx of complaints from businesses saying it’s too loud, they can’t stand it any more, these toddlers are just smacking it for a half an hour. We said look, we’ll just let it run, let it run. And a business came out and screwed it shut to stop anyone playing it.

So then we had to go out there and wheel it across the Market Place. Wheeling a piano across a market to please the businesses, unscrewed it… it’s scenarios like that that are a bit odd. You find yourself thinking “just an average day.”

Danny: It’s a big hit. As soon as we put it on, two young girls came up and were playing it. We had a lady with a kid in a wheelchair travelled from a different town to deliberately come and play on it- so it does make a difference. That balance is on us to reach, between the businesses and town.

We put the post up yesterday just alerting people that the piano’s back on the square, and it was one of the biggest hits in weeks. People putting up pictures of themselves playing it. It was awesome. So you’ve got to strike the right balance.

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You can keep up with what's coming next in Hitchin with Visit Hitchin's What's On calendar here.

Sadly, since this interview, the community piano has had to be removed from Market Square due to vandalism.

Action Hitchin, the charity through which residents can help with Visit Hitchin's projects, can be supported here.