Hopes that fine weather would dramatically improve footfall have been dashed as the number of shoppers rose by just 6.7% last week compared the wet and windy prior week.
Springboard reports that footfall for the week from Sunday, May 23, to Saturday, May 29 remained 26.8% lower than the same period in 2019.
It is important to note that the weekly figures do not include the glorious Sunday and Monday of the bank holiday weekend when footfall improved significantly.
Footfall rose by a relatively modest 4.4% on Saturday, on bank holiday Sunday footfall rose by 25% from the week before and by 47.4% in UK high streets.
The good news continued into Monday, with a week on week rise in footfall of 16% across all UK destinations, and by 29.3% in UK high streets.
“Despite rain continuing to persist at the beginning of last week, footfall in UK retail destinations rose from the week before, with the increase also being far greater than in the past five weeks. It was apparent that shoppers intended to make the most of the bank holiday weekend — and the good weather that was forecast — as footfall rose by substantially more on Thursday and Friday than earlier in the week,” Diane Wehrle, insights director at Springboard. Describes.
“Footfall rose in all three destination types last week from the previous week, but it was high streets that dominated in terms of uplift. All types of high street benefited, with Central London and coastal towns leading the way. The increase in activity in Central London was nearly double that in large city centres elsewhere in the UK, whilst the increases in market towns and outer London high streets were slightly lower, suggesting that shoppers are starting to gravitate towards larger locations.”
In Central London footfall rose by 17% from the week before, a larger rise than in any other high street type other than coastal towns where it rose by 18.2%.
In larger cities outside London footfall rose by 9.2%, by 9.8% in market towns and by 8.1% in Outer London.
