In 2017, Helensburgh Community Council created a sub-committee, Vision for Helensburgh, to understand what the people of Helensburgh wanted their town to be like in the future. Since then, we’ve all experienced a significant shift in behaviours brought on by the pandemic.

The Vision for Helensburgh work is intended to be part of our response to any planning process with Argyll and Bute Council as part of any planning application for the waterfront development. However, given that the pandemic changed a lot of behaviours, we wanted to get an insight into what the community wanted to ensure that any response was as robust as possible.

Through a website, we invited people to answer one question:

What would you like to see built in the empty Helensburgh waterfront space?

There were four options:

• Large retail development (M&S, Aldi, etc)
• Local retail development
• Community facilities
• Additional leisure development

People could then suggest other uses for the space or leave a comment.

We had 1,025 responses to the question. Here are the results:

Looking more into the comments that people left, two themes arose.

1. Any development on the waterfront site should focus firmly on the young people of Helensburgh and how we can make the town a better place for them.
   
2. While a large retail site on the waterfront isn’t desirable, people are looking for a cheaper retail option that could be placed elsewhere in the town.