A COMMUNITY plan to safeguard the future of a popular tourist town is to be drafted in the New Year.
Keep Holmfirth Special (KHS) and other community groups are to team up with international research company Codex Global to devise strategies to prevent Holmfirth slipping into decline.
Holmfirth has long benefited from tourism, mainly thanks to the BBC1 sitcom Last of the Summer Win, filmed around the town since the 1970s.
But the years and the series was axed by the BBC in 2010. A year earlier, Heritage England placed the town on its Heritage At Risk list.
Holmfirth town centre was classed as one of the worst-affected conservation areas in West Yorkshire because of vacant and derelict properties, such as the former premises of postcard and cinema producers Bamforth and Co.
Now KHS, other community groups and Codex Global are devising a survey to find out what people like most about Holmfirth and what they would like to see in the future.
Young people, local businesses and other residents will be invited to take part in the survey which will be piloted in January and rolled out by Spring.
The research is expected to take the form of an electronic survey, focus groups and one-to-one interviews.
Margaret Dale, of KHS, has emphasised that the study will be qualitative rather than mere number crunching.
She said: “No one should be making assumptions about what the answers are.
“There’s concern Holmfirth could end up in a bad situation. It did benefit from Last of the Summer Wine but many of us wonder what the future will be.
“We have a fair number of charity shops and estate agents and I’m not knocking them but we have cafes and bars and without the tourism they won’t stay alive.”
