The case for a harmonised national standard for place operation which adapts to the economy and flexes to the place.
A good contact of mine took on the running of a refurbished market hall in the East Midlands earlier this year, after he won the bid for what was an under-performing space. Being conscientious and alive to the particular grief of running a public place, rather than merely funding or building one, he was looking for the manual before the keys were in his hand. What he found was a considerable body of guidance, accreditation and professional standards, produced over two decades by serious institutions, none of it written with reference to any of the others.
Britain has at least nine relevant instruments. There is a Level 4 diploma for market officers, run by the National Association of British Market Authorities with the Institute of Place Management, which NABMA says more than 280 people have now completed. There is a NABMA health check, a diagnostic that asks whether a market has a business plan, a viable financial position, an investment strategy and management with the authority to enforce its own rules. There are two government guides on market management and good practice, thoughtful documents that ask whether a market serves its catchment and whether the expertise exists to run it, published in 2010 and untouched ever since. There is the Institute of Place Management’s 4Rs framework, distilled from research into 201 factors that move a high street, the most rigorous strategic method the field has. There is Purple Flag, an accreditation for town centres after dark. There are the BID Foundation’s audited industry standards for governance and transparency. There is the Greater London Authority’s toolkit for measuring what a market actually delivers in terms of footfall, occupancy, trader survival and community use, written for London and admired well beyond it. There is a research-led handbook for community and trader-run markets, launched through the national market bodies. And there is Real Deal, a charter that certifies a market is free of counterfeit goods.
Nine instruments, each built by a competent body for a real purpose, each doing one honest job and stopping at its edge. My contact had access to most of them. What none of them could tell him was the thing he had just been contracted to know. The responsibility for the hall was his firm’s, unambiguously, under the tender terms. What he lacked was a coherent method; one which goes beyond past experience alone. Nothing in the nine standards connected a diagnosis of why the place had failed to an intervention that would turn it, or to a measure that would tell him, month by month, whether the turn was taking. He had a credential, a readiness check, two frozen guides, a strategy framework, three narrow badges, one outcomes toolkit and one model-specific handbook. What he did not have was any guide to the daily work of actually making the place trade.
The easy conclusion and the awkward one
It is easy to conclude that Britain has never built a framework for running its public places once the builders have gone. The claim stays accurate at its core. The awkward reality is that Britain has built almost all the parts of one. They were built separately, by the bodies best placed to build each, and nothing has ever been put in place to hold them together or to keep them moving with the economy they are supposed to serve.
The demand for a cohesive, current, adaptive standard is not in doubt. In the two years to this summer, councils across seven English regions went to market for operators of market halls and food halls, eight operating mandates at least, and the procurement notices tend to say the same thing in the same words: a proven track record is essential. Buyers, in other words, know the bench is rather thin. In November 2024 the House of Lords Built Environment Committee said as much in committee language, finding that those responsible for high streets must have enough expertise to deliver improvements and recommending that every local authority have an active town centre manager. The government replied in February 2025 and the committee, having read the reply, said it was not good enough. A national High Streets Strategy was promised for this year. What arrived on 11 August, with the newly appointed Prime Minister on a high street in Ilkeston, was the measures package ahead of it. Planning permission for vape shops and adult gaming centres. The end of the “aim to permit” rule for betting premises. A programme with the Planning Advisory Service to set clearer standards for how high streets should look.
Some of that was overdue and most of it is popular, and I would not argue with a council’s right to decline a fourth vape shop. But look at what the package governs. It governs what may open and how it must look. Entry and surface. Britain will shortly have an official view on what a shopfront should look like, which is more than it has ever had on what should happen behind one. Compare it with what a highly influential American placemaking outfit did in the 1980s with Bryant Park, then a corner of Manhattan which people crossed the street to avoid, and more recently with Campus Martius in a Detroit downtown, a place that had largely emptied. Neither began with a standard or a prohibition. They began with observation, in the tradition of the American urbanist William Whyte, who simply watched what people do in a space and what they avoid. Then came cheap and reversible moves, movable chairs, a coffee cart, a programmed corner, tried and adjusted. Then came a management body, which woke up every morning with the responsibility for the place performing and has done so ever since. That is curation, proactive and continuous, and it is the half of the discipline the British package never mentions, because the British package is often about what to stop, and curation is about what to start.
Derby offers the live version of what happens when there is no method and no one whose job is to hold the place together. The city council, which has operated its market hall directly, reported in August an unsatisfactory financial outlook and is now exploring whether a private operator could take it on. Stated in the council’s own terms and no harsher, that is what the operating question looks like when it arrives. Real money, real market stalls and a search for someone who can carry the trading risk, conducted case by case because there is no standing arrangement to turn to.
A standard for everything except whether it works
Here is my observation put simply. Britain has a standard for almost everything about a public market except whether it works, and no instrument which tells the person running one how the standards fit together. Nothing reconciles them into a single management and curating tool, and nothing reconciles that tool with the town planning, licensing, health and safety and trading-standards regimes the operator also has to satisfy on the same day. Each standard is internally coherent. The set is not.
The officer can be qualified. The strategy can be methodologically sound. The governance can be audited. The evening economy can be flagged, the counterfeits charter-signed, the footfall measured to the London toolkit. And the hall can still be trading at one stall in five with no instrument anywhere in the system registering that as anyone’s failure, and no one provides a common, nationally maintained escalation route that specifies who must act, by when and against which measured threshold. Effort is accredited at every joint. No accreditation exists for the outcome. Those who have read my book, The Re-Alignment Era, will recognise the pattern and it does not need labouring. When a field accredits the inputs generously enough, the accreditation itself starts to stand in for the result it was meant to produce. There is a chapter on precisely that, for anyone whose enthusiasm for the subject outlasts this paragraph.
What makes this embarrassing rather than damning is that every one of the nine tools is a genuine achievement. NABMA has professionalised a workforce that had no qualification twenty years ago. The IPM has given the field a research base which most professions would envy. The BID standards are independently audited, which is more than can be said for a good deal of local government. No one in this story failed. Everyone built their piece. No identified UK framework fully integrates pre-opening demand creation and iterative experimentation with commercial mobilisation, tenant curation and long-term operating accountability.
Why no one has joined them
The reasons are not mysterious, and none of them involves anyone behaving poorly. In fact, they involve everyone behaving exactly as their respective position told them to.
Each instrument belongs to a membership body whose remit, and whose funding, is defined by the slice it built. NABMA is funded by market authorities; the IPM by place professionals; the ATCM by town centres; the BID bodies by BIDs. Merging the instruments into one operating standard is in no one’s mandate and would be a risk to everyone’s subscriptions. The assets themselves fall under different owners and regimes (council markets, privately owned food halls, BID areas), so no regulator has jurisdiction across them and no department has ever been obliged to look at the whole.
The one body that did have a brief to integrate, the High Streets Task Force, was designed as a five-year programme rather than an institution, trained nearly a thousand placemakers and advised 150 authorities, and concluded in September 2024 when its funding line did, as programmes do. Its own evaluation found that the temporary expertise it placed had converted into a permanent post in just six of 115 locations. And underneath all of it sits the reason the public frameworks stop where they stop. The operating question is commercial. Public bodies are structurally wary of commercial risk and the handful of private operators who genuinely know how to run these places have no incentive whatsoever to standardise the thing that is their edge.
So, the market did what markets do with an ownerless task. It left it on the table.
Where this could actually start
The tempting response is to call for a national body, and I am not going to make that call, because the honest assessment is that the components are on the table already and the missing thing is smaller than a body. It is connective tissue and a decision about who convenes. Three routes are worth setting out, and they are not alternatives so much as a sequence with some low fruit near the front.
The first is to harmonise, and it is worth being precise about what that would produce. Sequence the nine into a single spine which runs from diagnosis, through strategy, delivery and measurement, to accreditation. The health check becomes the entry diagnostic. The 4Rs becomes the strategic engine. The GLA toolkit, generalised beyond London, becomes the national measurement standard. The diploma becomes the competence layer. Purple Flag, Real Deal and the BID standards become modular quality marks that attach at the right stage rather than floating free. The material is written and has been paid for at least once; the cost is convening, not authoring, and the obstacle is who hosts it, which will have to survive the institutional politics described above. Do that and Britain would have the best place-management standard in the field, a shared language, comparable metrics across places and a way of saying what good looks like as a “process” rather than a snapshot. No one has built it. This is the conversation for a public body or a policymaker, and the government’s promised High Streets Strategy is the obvious place to start it.
That said, the harmonised spine would still be only half the answer, and certainly not the half that turns an under-performing place around. Every one of the nine instruments assumes a market or a centre that already exists in some form and has users to survey. They are managerial and evaluative, asking whether a place is well run, safe, solvent, well governed and strategically positioned. The health check would probably score a ghost downtown as failing and likely stop there. What places like Bryant Park and Campus Martius in the United States, Granary Square in London’s King’s Cross and Superkilen in Copenhagen needed, and what a fair share of British market halls need, is the front half of the loop. They needed a generative, pre-commercial method that manufactures demand and behaviour before capital is committed, by cheap and reversible experiment. They needed observation of how the place was used and avoided as the primary evidence, rather than surveys of users who are not yet there. They needed the active discipline of converting a hostile space into a welcoming one through sightlines, programming and continuous presence, which the British stack assesses a broader evening-economy environment, but it does not operate as a venue-level method for developing and repeatedly testing a market space offers. And they needed, and secured, permanent stewardship as an operating model rather than a governance box, the entity that wakes up every day and owns the place performance, as against the entity that merely has authority to enforce the rules. Governing a place and continuously making it perform are different jobs. The available British instruments are stronger on diagnosis, governance, compliance and strategic planning than on integrated commercial operation and iterative curation.
Which is the second route, and it requires no one’s permission. Owners, developers, asset managers and operators can adopt (and a few already practise or half-practise) exactly that method for the operating decade, marrying the generative placemaking discipline with the commercial, legal and financial structure the placemaking tradition tends to leave out.
Operator selection, turnover leasing, risk allocation, exit provisions and P&L and balance sheets which can survive the experiments have all been proven essential for successful public-facing places. So has the part that rarely makes it into a spreadsheet: curation as a discipline rather than merely a leasing strategy, choosing traders for the quality and authenticity of what they sell and the values they bring, their sourcing, their craft, their pull on a community, and then owning the harder balance beneath it, between the reliable trading partners who carry a scheme to break-even and the smaller, community-rooted, artisan makers who yield less in hard-cash rent but far more in social value and in the organic building of local skill and, more often than not, in organic footfall.
That balance is not sentiment. It is what keeps a place distinctive enough to survive the identikit competition down the road, and it is learned only by running one. It can start on the next scheme. What holds it back is that it stays proprietary and uneven until someone makes it a standard, which is why the first route still matters, and why the two routes belong together. This way, method would feed standards, and standards would measure method. This is the conversation for anyone who holds these assets and would prefer the yield to compound rather than decay over time.
The third route is the procurement lever. An operator competence standard, or an accredited panel, which a council can specify so that the “proven track record essential” line in every tender finally points at something truly measurable. It is the cheapest and quickest of the three, and the machinery to run it already exists in the several national procurement frameworks councils use for everything from consultancy to construction. The risk it carries is that it could entrench a narrow bench unless it runs alongside a pipeline, and the IPM’s degree apprenticeship for place managers, now in development, is the nearest thing to one and could stand up a first cohort within a year rather than a decade. Barcelona has run its markets through a permanent institute since 1991; the Netherlands gave its business improvement zones statutory footing in 2015. Permanence at scale is possible. It has simply never been chosen here as a priority.
The objections are the usual ones and they are answerable. On cost and duplication, every component already exists and the state has bought each of them at least once, so this is a bill largely already paid. On the fear of crowding out private operators, a standard is not an operator, and the good operators would be the first to clear it. On scale, nobody is proposing a body in every town; the market bodies already work by regional pooling, and this would too.
The jigsaw pieces are on the table and the country has paid for them. What it has never appointed is the people or bodies whose job is to make them add up, and what it has never written is the method that comes before them, for the places where there is nothing yet to measure. Neither needs considerable new investments or new laws to begin. Both need someone to claim them and a route to continuous refinement and adoption. For anyone who owns, funds, procures or advises on these places, the interesting question is who moves first, and from which side, public, private or the awkward and rather promising space between. My contact, for what it’s worth, has stopped looking for the manual and started writing one for his own hall, chairs first, standards after. That is how disciplines usually begin.
