Is it a place full of cool, or clones?

The people at the New Economics Foundation, an economic think-tank in London, put together a great tool for finding out, and you can get the pdf survey via the link at the bottom right of their website.  It’s more or less giving 5 points for every town center shop/venue, 5 points for every clone (ie chain), 50 points for every independent, then dividing that total by the number of venues.

The five towns we analyzed on our CoolTown tour had a score of 49.1, which puts them higher than average on the cool side.