Downtown Essex Centre & Harrow Main Street Design Guidelines Online Visioning Survey

The Town of Essex is preparing new Main Street Design Guidelines (Guidelines) for downtown Essex Centre and Harrow. The Guidelines will support continued revitalization of each main street and provide a coordinated design framework for how each downtown will evolve over time. 

The Guidelines will focus on the design of privately-owned sites and buildings, including new development, infill, redevelopment and improvements to existing sites, as well as how those sites and buildings relate to and interact with the public realm and downtown streetscape. The Guidelines will help ensure that future development complements the Town’s existing character and recent downtown streetscape improvements.

Downtown Essex Centre and Harrow each have their own character and identity. Through this survey, we want to understand what you value today and what you would like future development to look and feel like.

Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 10 - 15 minutes.

1. Introduction:

Your Connection to Essex Centre and Harrow

2. Familiarity with the Downtowns

The ongoing evolution of downtown Essex Centre and Harrow has been shaped by previous streetscape planning and community engagement, including the Downtown Essex Centre Streetscape & Silo District Plan (2013) and the Downtown Harrow Streetscape Design Guidelines (2018).

With this work now roughly a decade old, the new Main Street Design Guidelines provide an opportunity to confirm whether these earlier directions still reflect what the community wants today. We want to understand which existing vision principles and themes still resonate and what should be retained, strengthened, updated or reconsidered as the new Guidelines are developed.