Folkestone Regeneration: Can £22m Heal A Town Of Two Halves?

Folkestone’s regeneration scheme began with a painful truth: the town was being described as “a town of two halves”. Now KCC is leading the transport and public realm delivery, Jackson Civils is on the ground, and the cones are everywhere. The question isn’t whether the town centre will look tidier. It’s whether this really helps the people the original diagnosis was about.

There’s a moment in every regeneration story when the language stops sounding like a council document and starts sounding like real life. In Folkestone’s case, it came with one phrase: “a town of two halves”. We Made That’s Urban Appraisal, later picked up by Shepway Vox, said Folkestone was “increasingly divided and unequal”, with declining high streets, severe deprivation and poor-quality town-centre housing sitting alongside a thriving Creative Quarter, a growing visitor economy and those natural assets we all know are the reason so many people fall for the place in the first place. That’s not a neat planning problem. That’s the story of a town where some people get the sea view and others get the bill.

The Levelling Up bid carried that diagnosis forward. It said Folkestone “truly is ‘a town of two halves’”, with pockets of severe deprivation around the centre and north-east, but also some of the least deprived areas nationally. So the real promise wasn’t just a prettier Bouverie Square, a calmer Cheriton Road, or a less miserable walk from the station. The promise was that public money might help join Folkestone back together, not by magic, but by making the town centre easier to reach, easier to use, and a bit less tired around the edges.

That work started on paper. We Made That was appointed in January 2021 to lead the Place Plan work. The final draft was published in August 2021 and approved by Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Cabinet in September 2021, when councillors also approved the Levelling Up Fund route. The eventual bid was just under £22m: £21,990,910 in total, made up of £19,791,819 from the Levelling Up Fund and £2,199,091 in match funding. In council-speak, that’s a funding package. In human-speak, that’s a lot of money to spend on trying to make a town centre feel like it belongs to everyone again.

But the lead money trail for the roads and public realm doesn’t sit neatly at FHDC. KCC’s own project page says FHDC submitted the £19.8m Levelling Up bid, matched by £2.2m from FHDC, but then says: “We are the delivery partner for the transport and public realm elements of the scheme.” KCC lists Station Approach, Cheriton Road and Cheriton Gardens, Middelburg Square, Shellons Street, Foresters Way, Sandgate Road, Guildhall Street and Bouverie Square as roads and areas in the scheme. So when we follow the transport and public realm money, we follow KCC.

The main civil engineering contract went to Jackson Civil Engineering Limited. The procurement record names Kent County Council as buyer, records the contract as signed on 15 January 2025, and gives the value as about £12.8m. That matters because the £19.8m Levelling Up grant isn’t the same thing as the Jackson contract. One is the wider grant envelope. The other is the main highways and public realm construction package. Confusing the two is how perfectly respectable public money turns into fog.

Then the plan met Folkestone’s pavements. Jackson’s first newsletter said the works had “now begun”, with a site compound in the temporarily closed Foresters Way car park, lane closures, a new layby on Foresters Way, a suspended Shellons Street bus stop and exploratory holes for third-party utilities. It also said the work had been broken into smaller phases to minimise disruption. Anyone who has tried to get across town since may have their own view on the word “minimise”, but that’s the nature of major works: tomorrow’s improvement usually starts by making today more irritating.

By the summer, the scheme had become visible in the way these schemes always become visible: barriers, temporary lights, footpath diversions, men in orange, and everybody suddenly becoming an amateur highways engineer at the traffic lights. Jackson’s newsletters record footways, kerbs, drainage systems, Radnor Park traffic controls, Middelburg Square subway infilling, utility diversions, Cheriton Road gas works and new bus-stop works. That’s the unglamorous bit of regeneration. Before anyone can have civic pride, someone has to dig up a kerb.

Bouverie Square is the emotional centre of the scheme. It’s where the old bus station is supposed to give way to a green public space, a new garden square, a softer front door to the town. Jackson’s August newsletter put it simply: “Bouverie Square is returning to its former use as a garden square and a new linear bus station is being created.” The bus station closed on Saturday 20 September 2025, with temporary stops from 21 September. That’s a big shift for bus users, traders, older residents, disabled people and anyone whose daily life depends on knowing exactly where the next bus home leaves from.

FHDC said in July 2025 that a quarter of the programme was complete, that the bus station would move to a linear layout, and that Bouverie Square would return to its former use as a garden square. It also quoted KCC’s highways cabinet member saying KCC crews were on the ground regularly to keep traffic moving as smoothly as possible during construction. That’s the public reassurance. The lived reality, of course, is more mixed: some people will welcome the ambition, some will curse the delays, and most will do both depending on the time of day.

By early 2026, the newsletters show the scheme in its messiest, most revealing stage. Cheriton Road rain gardens were being installed. Shellons Street and Guildhall Street were getting granite paving. Bouverie Square public toilets were closed for refurbishment. An infiltration tank was planned for rainwater reuse. Archaeology turned up too, including Bronze Age pottery on Cheriton Road, post-medieval footings in Sandgate Road and chalk-filled Second World War features in Bouverie Square. Folkestone, being Folkestone, couldn’t even be dug up without producing a history lesson.

Now to the money. We checked KCC’s April 2025 to January 2026 invoices-over-£250 spreadsheets. Under the exact service wording “TRA New or imp of rds Folkestone A Brighter Futures”, the published net total paid to Jackson Civils LTD to date is £2,941,794.37. KCC says its invoice data covers invoices paid in the reporting month with a net value over £250, excluding VAT, and that reports are extracted by payment date, so these files are not a live project ledger. They’re useful, but they’re not the full bedside chart for the patient.

That £2.942m looks low beside a £12.8m net Jackson contract and a £19.8m grant, but it doesn’t prove money is missing. It proves the published trail is incomplete, staged and hard for ordinary residents to follow. Jackson Civils appears elsewhere in KCC’s spreadsheets under non-Folkestone headings, but those can’t honestly be counted as Folkestone unless KCC says they’ve been miscoded, recharged or moved through some other accounting route. The simple ask is this: publish a plain-English reconciliation showing grant drawdowns, Jackson payments, variations, contingency, Folca spend and forecast final cost.

And that brings us back to the line that started it all. If Folkestone is “a town of two halves”, new paving won’t be enough. It may help. Better crossings matter. Safer bus stops matter. A greener Bouverie Square matters. A town centre that feels cared for matters. But deprivation doesn’t disappear because the granite is level, and poor housing doesn’t improve because the planter has been filled. The real test is whether people who’ve felt pushed to the edge of Folkestone feel any closer to its centre when the barriers come down.

So we’ll judge this fairly, because the town deserves ambition and nobody should sneer at investment in public space. But we won’t judge it softly. KCC is the lead delivery partner for the transport and public realm works, and KCC is where the main public money trail for those works sits. The scheme may yet make Folkestone kinder, greener and easier to move through. Let’s hope it does. But if the promise was to help heal a town of two halves, the final question isn’t whether the cones have gone by summer 2026. It’s whether the divide has.

The Shepway Vox Team

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