Understanding and supporting the resilience of market towns

The research has been undertaken by Action for Market Towns (AMT) and Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) and has been supported through funding by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC). The main aims of the research were as follows:

• to understand the economic resilience of market towns considering how the public social and commercial economies operate and interact with each other;

• to uncover evidence of impacts of recession on market towns in order to better understand their vulnerability to national and global economic pressure.

This work is the first part of a larger research project into the resilience of market towns to be undertaken over the next year by CLES and AMT.