Coastal towns are winners as sunshine boosts UK retail footfall says Springboard

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Mar 21, 2022

The arrival of spring-like weather seems to have boosted footfall to UK retail destinations in the past week with the seven days to March 20 seeing a 2.3% uplift compared to the previous week.

And the rise was particularly strong on high streets, where footfall rose as much as 4.2% against an increase of just 0.5% in shopping centres in 0.1% in retail parks.

That's all according to Springboard, which said that from Thursday onwards when the weather was starting to warm up, footfall rose as much as 8.1% across all retail destinations and 12.4% on high streets compared to the previous week.

In fact, on Friday alone, the uplift doubled to 16.1% across all destinations and hit 25.8% on high streets. And coastal towns really benefited with a rise of an impressive 40.8%.

The bad news is that the gap between current conditions and footfall in the pre-pandemic 2019 period widened marginally to -15.2% from -13.1% in the previous week. That said, footfall was up 112.4% from the same week in 2021 when was the last full UK lockdown was still in force.

As mentioned, coastal towns were understandably the biggest beneficiaries of the weather uplift, although market towns also rose 3.1% compared to the previous week. It's good news as well that cities felt the benefits with Central London up 4.9% and other city centres up 4.7%.

City centres have been major victims of the pandemic as the lack of tourists, and office workers continuing to do their jobs from home, has hit them hard and their recovery has been very slow. Central London footfall is still 26% down on the comparable 2019 period.