The 15 shortlisted towns will receive \u00a360,000 each to develop their full bids, which will be assessed by a judging panel.<\/p>\n
The other shortlisted towns are:<\/p>\n
Medium towns<\/p>\n
Small towns<\/p>\n
Ilfracombe, Devon<\/p>\n
Isle of Bute, Scotland<\/p>\n
Lerwick, Scotland<\/p>\n
Sandown, Isle of Wight<\/p>\n
Strabane, Northern Ireland<\/p>\n
Stockton Town Centre Ward, County Durham<\/p>\n
According to data from 2016, the council district of Basildon serves roughly 176,000 people, with engineering, retail, distribution and financial services being the most prominent industries.<\/p>\n
It has a high proportion of social tenants, with a fewer-than-average number of residents owning their own homes.<\/p>\n
The other Essex towns which entered bids – but were ultimately unsuccessful – were Harlow, Maldon, Leigh-on-Sea, Rochford, Saffron Walden and Witham.<\/p>\n
Do you have a story suggestion for Essex? Contact us below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 15 shortlisted towns will receive \u00a360,000 each to develop their full bids, which will be assessed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-683428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}