There was a boost for the local Milton Keynes economy today as the retail sector in our area has seen one of the largest footfall increases across England post-lockdown.
Centre For Cities have conducted research comparing visitor footfall on the week beginning 15th June, the first week when non-essential retail was allowed to open, with the previous week.
Milton Keynes saw the seventh highest footfall increase of all English towns and cities - beaten only by Warrington, Hull, Telford, Bournemouth, Burnley and Sunderland.
Areas including London, Manchester, Nottingham, Luton and York saw the smallest increases in footfall following the re-opening of non-essential retail.
The data reinforces Centre for Cities concerns about the future of local services such as shops and restaurants in larger city centres if significant numbers of office workers continue to work from home.
The faster recovery that smaller cities are seeing is likely to be due to the concentration of shops and jobs in a single city centre, unlike in places such as London or Manchester, where multiple neighbourhood hubs are spread across the city-region.
On a UK-wide level, cities in Scotland and Wales saw some of the smallest recoveries in high street footfall but this is unsurprising as, unlike England and Northern Ireland, they remained in lockdown for the period analysed.
Conversely, Belfast also saw the tenth largest footfall recovery in the UK, as non-essential shops opened on 12 June.
