Plymouth has the strongest high street in the UK post-lockdown

Plymouth has come out top in a national survey of UK high streets in terms of its recovery from the impact of COVID.
By looking into official reports around the UK high streets, including the opening and closings of stores and the High Street Recovery Tracker, online money-saving and fund raising website Savoo has created an index to show which UK cities have the strongest high streets.

Plymouth comes out on top with the highest overall index recovery score (165) of all the cities analysed – which takes into account the footfall in each city centre in comparison to pre-lockdown – along with the highest scores for weekday, weekend and night time footfall. Blackpool comes 2nd with the highest spend score (195) of the cities analysed.

Steve Hughes, chief executive of the Plymouth City Centre Company, said:“ This survey confirms what our businesses and our footfall cameras are telling us.

“There’s still a lot of improvement works going on with hoardings still up in some areas of the city centre.
“Christmas footfall was very positive and for the first four weeks of this year it is up more than 10% compared to last year and last week was up 22% on the same week last year.

“It’s still challenging for retailers and, especially hospitality, but overall spend is up as well. The really encouraging news for us is that we have had lots of new businesses opening up with some more to come and investment from landlords in some of our empty buildings.

“That’s on the back of all the improvement schemes especially Armada Way. Shoppers and investors can now see what is coming and they like what they see. Now is a really good time to open a business in the city centre.”