Retail footfall bounced back last week
Retail footfall bounced back last week with a rise by 11.1% across all UK retail destinations. This follows a drop of 3.8% in the previous seven-day period due to the impact of Storms Dudley and Eunice.
According to figures from Springboard, the bounce back mainly emanated from a big increase in footfall on Friday and Saturday as the sunny weather encouraged more people to visit retail destinations. In the five days from Sunday to Thursday, footfall saw an average decline of 0.2% from the week before, but on Friday and Saturday there was an average uplift of 43.3%.
While high streets enjoyed a 15.5% increase in footfall in the week, retail parks and shopping centres saw rises of 3.3% and 9.6% respectively.
Diane Wehrle, insights director at Springboard, said: “Footfall across UK retail destinations bounced back in overall terms last week from the severe impact of the storms in the previous week. However, this was wholly due to a recovery in footfall on Friday and Saturday, which was undoubtedly helped by the dry sunny weather on these two days, but also due to exceptionally low comparables in the week before due to the impact on footfall because of Storms Dudley and Eunice.”
Meanwhile, footfall rose in all town types last week, with an uplift of 17% in Central London and 20.3% in Springboard’s Back to the Office benchmark, which indicates that more workers are returning to the office following the removal of Covid-19 restrictions. However, in city centres outside of the capital the increase was lower at 10%.
The figures meant that the gap from 2019 levels narrowed noticeably, to -17.2% from -26.3% in the week before.
