Station Road, Hinckley, with some ‘heritage’ street furniture.

Hinckley is a pleasant enough town which has made a number of development mistakes in the past. The town centre is somewhat bitty with important places such as the railway station away on a limb while few people visiting the centre were getting to Upper Castle Street shops. David Lock Associates were commissioned to produce a town centre regeneration plan and Transport Initiatives were asked to contribute by producing a direction signing strategy.

Bespoke direction sign in Argents Mead. Neither the style nor the legends fit anything else in the town, other than the other bespoke signs of course.

Existing signing in the town was messy with multiple designs and no coherent or consistent set of destination names. Much of the signing and street furniture in the town was in the cast iron ‘heritage’ style while a new development had brushed stainless steel signs and someone had clearly tried to sort things out with a rather whimsical set of bespoke signs.

The town plan.

There was also an artistic town map. But what was shown on the map was not the same as all the places that were signed. The first task was therefore to choose a set of destination names that could be used across all signs and a re-drawn map.  The town had some distinctive names such as ‘Druid’.

How to get to everywhere from everywhere else.

The second task was to work out where the various places would be signed from so that people would be able to find them. The image to the left shows the signed route to various locations in the town. The job was made a little more difficult as David Locke Associates had identified a ring route around the centre that they felt needed to be promoted; the ‘Hinckley Hoop’. The hoop route was not always the quickest or most logical way between two places in the town centre.

A information ‘kiosk’ on Castle Street.

The ‘legible city’ concept is a way of guiding people around an area primarily using maps with some signs rather than primarily using signs with a few maps dotted around the place. Although the ‘monoliths’ are large and potentially intrusive features in a small scale streetscape there only need to be relatively few of them and in any case Hinckley town centre already had these interactive information kiosks shown on the left.

A Hinckleyized Monolith

The legible city monoliths we drew were clearly based on those by TfL although we did change the maps and added lots of Hinckley destinations.

Our strategy produced a blueprint for a more coherent and consistent set of direction signs to guide visitors more easily around the town centre.

We have also produced direction signing schemes for Nottingham and Warrington Councils