A £880,000 underspend and what it pays for
South Kesteven District Council did not return its unspent regeneration money to government. Instead, in 2026, it redirected an £880,000 underspend — left over from the Market Place and Station Approach works — into a permanent power infrastructure upgrade for Grantham town centre.
The project is the final phase of a programme that began when SKDC secured £5.56 million from the Future High Streets Fund in 2020–21. The largest single element was the 2024 physical realm works: a £1.8 million scheme running from May to September that raised road levels across the Market Place to match existing Yorkstone paving, producing a level, flexible multi-use square. The £880,000 package followed once SKDC had negotiated permission from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to retain the surplus rather than surrender it.
The power element installs eight cabinets in total: four within the Market Place itself and four along Narrow Westgate. The supply runs directly from the National Grid and supports both single-phase and three-phase connections, giving traders, seasonal stalls, and event organisers direct access to mains electricity. The practical result is that outdoor events in the square can operate without portable diesel generators.
What a diesel generator actually does to a public square
Stand close enough to a portable diesel generator and the sound is not simply loud — it fills the body. Typical units used at outdoor markets and events run at between 70 and 110 dBA, a range that places them comfortably above a busy road and approaching the output of a pneumatic drill. The threshold at which sustained exposure begins to risk hearing damage is 85 dBA, a figure diesel generators can exceed without any mechanical fault — just by running.
Volume, though, is only part of it. Generators produce a persistent low-frequency drone and a physical vibration that travel through the ground and surrounding air. Unlike the sharp crack of a passing vehicle, this is a continuous environmental layer: it does not arrive and leave, it simply sits across the square for the duration of an event.
Then there is what you breathe. Diesel exhaust carries particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NOx) with well-documented respiratory health effects. An event running several generators in a pedestrianised square concentrates that exhaust plume at ground level, in a space where people are standing still rather than moving through.
The result is a market or community event experienced through noise, vibration, and air quality simultaneously — a sensory environment shaped less by the event itself than by the infrastructure powering it.
The visitors the noise and fumes quietly turned away
For hearing aid and cochlear implant users, the problem is more specific than loudness. Many devices are designed to amplify sound rather than filter it selectively — at generator noise levels, that amplification turns an accessible technology into a source of pain. The market square does not become difficult for these visitors; it becomes unwearable.
Autistic and neurodivergent visitors face a related but distinct mechanism. Research by Patrick and McKinnon (2022, UCL Global Disability Innovation Hub), cited fifty times in the public space literature, identifies noise alongside smells and light levels as underappreciated sensory barriers that restrict disabled participation in public life. Persistent low-frequency drone and ground vibration — characteristic generator outputs — are particularly disorienting: they cannot be tuned out or habituated to in the way that varied, intermittent sounds sometimes can. For some visitors, this is the difference between attending and not attending.
The respiratory dimension is less contested. Diesel exhaust concentrated in a pedestrianised square represents a genuine health risk for people with asthma, COPD, or heightened chemical sensitivity. This is not a preference or a comfort issue; it is a physiological barrier.
None of these groups appears in SKDC's communications about the power upgrade. No published equality impact assessment documents their experience of the space during events. The connection between removing generators and reducing their exclusion is drawn from disability and public health research — it was not the stated reason for the works.
How the upgrade was described — and what was left out
SKDC's press release on the 2026 works is precise and consistent in its framing: events will be held 'without the need for noisy generators,' and the change will 'support our market traders.' The language is unambiguous about what is being removed and who benefits. Inclusion is not named. Accessibility is not named. Sensory barriers are not named.
The same pattern held for the road-raising works completed in 2024 — already noted in this article's opening. Levelling the carriageway to match the pedestrian surface created a genuinely step-free square, a functional gain for wheelchair users, people with pushchairs, and anyone for whom an uneven surface transition presents difficulty. The official description centred on creating a 'flexible, multi-use open space' suited to markets and community events. The accessibility outcome was real; it simply was not the stated one.
Taken together, these are not isolated oversights. They reflect the framing logic of the funding programme itself. The Future High Streets Fund was designed to 'drive growth, improve experience and ensure future sustainability.' Inclusion does not appear in that sentence, and what a fund measures tends to follow what it names.
This is not a charge of deliberate exclusion. The council's communications follow the vocabulary of the programme that finances the works. But framing shapes what gets counted after the fact. If a project is described as noise reduction for traders, the beneficiaries on record are traders — not the visitors for whom that noise was a barrier to arriving in the first place.
The gap between looking inclusive and functioning that way
The distinction the Grantham case illuminates is between two modes of accessibility — one legible and documented, the other functional but unnamed.
Performative accessibility centres on what can be seen and measured: dropped kerbs, ramps, accessible toilet provision, contrasting signage. These are genuine interventions, and the compliance frameworks that require them serve a real purpose. But they leave untouched a broader class of barrier — noise levels, air quality, sensory load — that sits outside formal categorisation even as it operates as exclusion in practice.
Patrick and McKinnon's 2022 research makes the pattern explicit: sensory barriers fall between established categories, which is partly why they go unaddressed. A space can pass a compliance audit and still be effectively unusable for a significant share of its potential visitors on event days.
The power upgrade is a useful example precisely because it was not designed as an accessibility project. That is what makes the outcome interesting: the infrastructure now functions as inclusion without being framed as such. The design thinking exists in the public space literature; it arrived in Market Place through an economic rationale. What it does for visitors who were quietly excluded from event days is real — it simply was not the reason given.
What it would look like to say so out loud
The infrastructure is already in place. Eight power cabinets — four in the Market Place, four along Narrow Westgate — will connect traders and event organisers directly to mains supply, replacing diesel units that operated at noise levels capable of exceeding safe hearing thresholds. That change will happen regardless of what language surrounds it.
The remaining question is narrower: what follows if the next press release, equalities report, or FHSF-style funding bid mentions who else benefits? Not as a legal footnote, not as a headline claim, but as a sentence in a document that reaches people deciding whether to plan a Saturday morning in town.
Naming the gain changes two practical things. It changes who knows they might be welcome — hearing aid users, people with autistic children, visitors managing respiratory conditions. And it changes what is counted as a result. If inclusion is not stated as an outcome, there is no mechanism by which it can be measured or built on.
The ask is modest. The square exists. The market runs every Saturday from half past eight to three. People arrive, or they don't. Eight cabinets and a levelled road surface have already shifted the conditions for who can be among those who do. The description has not caught up yet.