The first Newent Town Centre Survey took place in July 2024. The aim of the survey is to take an annual snapshot of who is using our town centre, what they use if for, and how they feel about it.

The study aimed to capture live data of visits to the town centre as they happened. So most surveys were completed in town, on paper, with the help of local businesses and volunteers. An electronic version of the survey was available. However this was only made available via QR codes on posters in the town centre, it was not shared online.

303 surveys were completed over 7 days and you can find a snapshot of the 2024 results below.

If you are interested in finding out more, please contact us at hello@createnewent.org.

Newent Town Centre Survey 2024

Respondents were asked to give 3 words that best described Newent Town Centre for them. The word most used to describe our town in 2024 was “FRIENDLY”

Making Newent a Better Place

Respondents were asked “What one thing would make Newent town Centre a better place for you?”

Again, the word cloud below is pretty unambiguous.

Shopping was the most frequently cited reason for being in the town centre – with visits to the lake, work, coffee, taking part in classes and socialising also featuring.

How Often do You visit Newent?

A full 75% or respondents visited the town centre at least once a week with nearly a quarter visiting 5 – 7 times per week. 25% visited less often. 6% of those surveyed classed themselves as visitors/tourists in the town.

How did you Get here Today.

Not surprisingly, over half of those surveyed – 60% had come by car or van. 34% had walked into town with the remaineder, just 6% coming by bus, bike or scooter.

Where have you Come From Today?

We broke respondents down into 3 groups.

• Residents – people who live in Newent
• Locals – people who have come from within 10 miles, this includes all our local villages, Ledbury, Ross and Gloucester, but excludes the other 3 Forest towns, which are all further than 10 miles.
• Visitors – people who have come from more than 10 miles away.

Residents

Newent residents made up nearly half of all those surveyed.

Locals – Within 10 miles

Around one third of those surveyed were classed as locals and had travelled less than 10 miles to be here.

Its interesting to note here that the biggest single group of local visitors to the town centre (other than Newent residents) comes from Gloucester. The low numbers coming from Ross and Ledbury, and the high number from Gorsley are also interesting.

visitors from further afield

16% of those surveyed had travelled over 10 miles to visit Newent.

Of these, the greatest number were from the Forest – where all the other three towns lie outside the 10 mile distance. South Wales was also well represented and visitors had come from as far away as Devon, London and Shropshire.

Marks out of 10

If we had only asked one question this would have been it.

When asked to award marks out of 10 for Newent Town Centre with 1 being Awful and 10 being Awesome the average score was 6.2 out of 10.

This score is known as an approval rating. 7 out of 10 or above is generally thought to be good,

It is worth taking look at this figures in a little more detail.

We broke respondents down into 3 groups:

• Residents – people who live in Newent
• Locals – people who have come from within 10 miles, this includes all our local villages, Ledbury Ross nd Gloucester, but exclued the other 3 Forest towns, which are all further than 10 miles.
• Visitors – people who have come from more than 10 miles away.

There are some striking differences in approval ratings from different groups.

It is a common theme for visitors to view a place more favourably that residents, the difference here is relatively small and not a surprise.

The striking figures are the scores from locals – within 10 miles.

Newent is clearly hitting the mark for visitors who come to us from Gloucester, with a strong approval rating of 7.3.

Other visitors from our local area though – that’s all of our surrounding villages – the people who might think of Newent as “Town” score us very badly with an approval rating of just 5.4. What are we doing wrong?

Conclusions

This is the first annual Newent Town Centre Survey and taken in conjunction with the Forest of Dean District Councils annual Town Centre Monitoring Reports should form a benchmark against which to measure our progress over coming years.

There are however clear actions and areas for investigation coming through even from this first survey.

• Friendly is pretty good as the first word that comes to mind to describe Newent -how do we keep and build on this.
• “More Shops!” is the resounding plea from those surveyed on how to improved Newent. How can we make this happen?
• Why do people from Gloucester like us so much? How can we bring more of them to the town?
• Why are we getting next to no visitors from our neighbouring towns of Ross and Ledbury?
• Why are people from our surrounding villages so dissatisfied with Newent? How can we change this?

We only split our data one way – by visitors home location – for this analysis. With a sample size of 303 there are lots of other ways we could have chosen to analyse the data.

If there are other questions you think this survey might be able to answer, please contact us at hello@createnewent.org and we will help if we can.