Retail, Leisure, and Town Centres

Tetra Tech Planning helps retailers, developers, and the public sector create successful retail, leisure and town centres developments through detailed technical studies and development management.

We have extensive experience in supporting retailers, leisure operators, developers, and councils with their planning needs. Our team has helped many local planning authorities plan for effective town centres by preparing studies, health checks, and identifying opportunities to meet retail and leisure requirements. We also offer expert advice on developing retail and leisure planning policy.

Retail

Through our longstanding relationships with some of the UK’s highest profile retailers, we have prepared retail impact assessments and sequential tests to help develop successful sites in town centres, edge-of-centre, and out-of-centre locations across the food, non-food, and service sectors. Our teams submit hundreds of applications each year for planning permission and advertisement consent, maximising opportunities from existing estates and new opportunity sites.

Our retail planning work has helped petrol filling station operators find and develop new sites offering expanded facilities including food retail and take-away facilities, in addition to the traditional fuel offer.

Working with the advertising industry, we also help retailers maximise brand awareness through the rollout of traditional and digital outdoor advertising on business premises and free-standing hoardings.

Leisure

In the leisure sector, we identify and create exciting opportunities for restaurants, hotels, leisure parks, camping and caravan sites as well as other recreation activities as part of mixed-use schemes or standalone development.

We work across all areas of the leisure spectrum from high-end and budget hotels to sports and leisure centres, cinemas, and drive-thru facilities. This extends to supporting camping and leisure operators in gaining planning permission for campgrounds and lodges, often in remote and rural locations, to support the tourism industry.

We also help restaurant industry organisations diversify from a traditional eat-in model to mixed operations featuring eat-in, take-away, and delivery – which also applies to development of dark kitchens for delivery-only operation.