How are high streets recovering from lockdown?
The Eat Out To Help Out scheme and good weather are benefiting seaside towns more than big cities.
The Eat Out To Help Out scheme and good weather are benefiting seaside towns more than big cities.
The latest update of Centre for Cities High Street recovery tracker, in association with Nationwide Building Society, shows how the recovery of the UK’s 63 largest city centres is happening at different speeds depending on where you are in the country. Analysing the data up to the 11th of August shows three main trends:
When looking at overall footfall between the end of June and early August, the variation is clear: coastal towns have had a bigger increase in activity (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Increase in footfall, top and bottom 10
Source: Locomizer (2020).
This is mostly driven by visitors from outside the city (see Figure 2). The combination of good weather and rather limited prospects of travel abroad (made harder by quarantines from Britain’s favourite summer destinations, Spain and France) has generated a resurgence of attractiveness for smaller, coastal cities such as Bournemouth, Blackpool and Brighton – in addition to usual touristy destinations like York or Edinburgh. Most of these places actually have a larger share of people coming from outside the city than before the lockdown.
Figure 2. Relationship between change in activity and outside visitors
Source: Locomizer (2020)
The boost in activity in these seaside towns and smaller cities has not just been driven by good weather and tourists on crowded beaches during weekends. They have also appear to have benefited the most from the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, introduced earlier this month, which has also brought more people to city centres during on weeknights too.
When looking at the change in footfall on Monday to Wednesday nights after the scheme was introduced, coastal cities such as Bournemouth or Southend appear on top (see figure 3), with more than 20 percentage point increase in visitors on these evenings in early August compared to late July.
Figure 3. Effect of the EOTHO scheme on footfall, top and bottom 10
Source: Locomizer (2020).
Being by the sea was not the only factor. More generally, smaller city centres appear to have benefited the most from the scheme to date. In these places, average footfall on Eat Out To Help Out evenings was 12 percentage points higher than in late July. But its impact on larger city centres was more muted – London, Manchester and Sheffield are all in the bottom 10 (Figure 3).
Centre for Cities will publish more analysis on the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme in the coming days.
Although there’s a rise in people going out for leisure, city centre workers are showing no signs of returning to their offices. This is a nation-wide trend: average weekday city centre footfall has not changed at all since early July, and the number of workers heading back to the office has increased in fewer than half of the UK’s biggest cities and town centres.
This affects larger city centres the most. Their ability to pull in many tens of thousands of workers before lockdown was a real boon for their shops and restaurants. But people’s reluctance to travel for work now becomes an achilles heel. In central London and Manchester, early August footfall rose by just one percentage point compared to early July, while Leeds, Bristol and Nottingham all saw no change. As a result, large city centres currently have just 16 per cent of their workers back behind their desks or counters, compared to 27 per cent in small cities (figure 4).
Figure 4. Workers score
Source: Locomizer (2020).
Shops, restaurants and pubs face an uncertain future while these office workers stay away. So, in the absence of a big increase in people returning to the office, the Government should set out how it will support the people working in city centre retail and hospitality who could soon lose their jobs.
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John Charlesworth
Thanks for this. An excellent summary showing how Coronavirus, and an associated increase in Tourism in the UK, has affected local economies. Is there any way the East Coast of Rural Lincolnshire can be included in the analysis? Skegness of Cleethorpes (even Hunstanton on the Norfolk Coast). Many people visit from urban areas in the Midlands and surrounds: they have a marked effect on the economies of the seaside towns.