Like place-leaders and businesses across the country, at People & Places, we will be watching and influencing how returning customers will vote with their feet over the coming months. We know that it will be important to track customers’ returns to old habits and haunts. It will also be crucial to understand their new patterns of behaviour in getting the most out of our town and city centres.
Driving revitalisation through data
At People & Places, our work with communities begins by gathering and monitoring data to help develop and drive town centre revitalisation. We are always looking for new ways to achieve and share good practice. We feel the route out of lockdown, as returning customers will vote with their feet, will be a time for accelerated learning and joint problem solving amongst place leaders.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic we have been tracking national trends and monitoring the practical impacts of policies in analysis such as or recent blog on lockdown roadmap’s greenlights and bottlenecks. We have also been busy updating the Local Government Association’s (LGA) national revitalising town centres toolkit including a series of good practice case studies from towns around the country.
Understanding travel to town
More and more in our work, we find there is a need to understand how and why people travel to and around our town centres. This has of course been heightened during the pandemic and will continue to be crucial as lockdown is eased and towns plan for recovery and beyond.
Monitoring footfall (the numbers of people coming into town) and foot-flow (how they move around town) is an important part of understanding customers journeys alongside solutions such as our people, places and parking process. Indeed, in its guide to establishing a footfall baseline as part of COVID-19 recovery planning, the High Streets Task Force recognised that counting footfall has become even more important. It demonstrates if and how customers are returning to town centres and guiding necessary interventions.
Learning from lockdown case studies
As part of our work to share good practice through the corona-crsis, we prepared a case study on tracking Nuneaton’s footfall through the COVID-19 pandemic for the LGA. Whilst the data from footfall monitoring in Nuneaton showed a dramatic fall from late March 2020, it also demonstrated that the easing of restrictions in August prompted a rapid bounce back to 79% of 2019 footfall levels.
The case study gave us the chance to get to grips with Proximity Futures’ GEO-Sense footfall monitoring system used in Nuneaton and also apply some of the learning it offers about foot-flow around towns. As GEO-Sense monitors mobile phone activity around town, we were able to investigate how the balance of foot-flow changed as the pandemic progressed. The data demonstrated, for example, that Nuneaton’s Market Place was no longer the most popular first destination for customers in summer 2020.
Invited to undertake similar analysis of quarterly footfall monitoring for LOVE Loughborough BID using GEO-Sense data, we found similar patterns of decline followed by rapid recovery when restrictions were eased. The extremes were greatest for the evening economy. Foot-flow to Loughborough’s Market Square as a key destination was also the most markedly impacted by the pandemic.
Tracking footfall with Proximity Futures
On the strength of the work in Nuneaton and Loughborough, we are working with Proximity Futures to help capture more learning from the depth of data that their GEO-Sense system offers. We can provide a quarterly footfall analysis service in those towns that would value an expert external eye alongside their local knowledge of what is happening on the ground. We agree with the High Streets Task Force that tracking footfall and foot-flow will be crucially important in gauging the success of interventions as part of recovery planning and offering lessons for the longer-term transformation of town centres. Our working title for this service is “people, places & proximity”.
Managing foot-flow
Often when we apply the LGA’s town centre checklist in our work, we find the challenge is to improve the foot-flow around the whole of a town centre. This distributes high levels of footfall from central areas so that outlying businesses benefit and customers have a more complete experience. Already we have combined analysis of Proximity Futures’ GEO-Sense footfall and town centre Wi-Fi usage data in towns where we are both working, to better understand how visitors navigate around the centre and the impact of events. Excitingly, across North Tyneside towns, we have combined forces from the outset to build footfall and foot-flow monitoring into the recovery planning process.
Sharing successes between places
As independent practitioners, at People & Places, we are not wedded to GEO-Sense as the only way of understanding footfall and foot-flow. Other footfall monitoring systems are available! We are though excited about the prospect for learning from some of the yet untapped depth of data in the GEO-Sense system and the benefits that can bring to places. As ever, we will maintain our philosophy of seeking to share successes from one place in ways that can benefit others. Watch this space for more shared learning.
Let’s ‘talk of the town’
We love to share information on what works between places through our ‘talk of the town‘ network here and on social media such as LinkedIn. Here’s some recent highlights to share with you:
- Find out about our people, places & proximity services developed jointly with Proximity Futures to help place-leaders understand more about managing and monitoring returning town centre footfall.
- Learn about People & Places’ joined-up approach to revitalisation provided by our ‘specialities’ in our guide to ‘‘bringing facts and faces to town centres’.
- Get an understanding of our joined-up approach to town centre recovery and revitalisation from the revised version of Local Government Association’s national revitalising town centres on-line toolkit prepared by People & Places.
- Keep up-to-date with information on how place-leaders can respond to the COVID-19 crisis, keep an eye on our beyond COVID-19 page and links.
