BRADFORD showed a recovery in its footfall following ‘Super Saturday’, new research has found.
Centre for Cities has published new data from its High Streets Recovery Tracker covering ‘Super Saturday’, where pubs opened across England on July 4.
The data shows that while many of the UK’s largest cities continued to show weak city centre footfall, despite the opening of pubs, some place, including Bradford, did see a return to normality.
Bradford just missed out on the top 10 of cities and towns with improved footfall.
Two places that have been identified by the Government as facing the worst Covid-19 outbreaks also saw comparatively high numbers of people out enjoying the lifting of restrictions. These were Bradford and Blackburn.
Its overall recovery index score was 77, placing it the highest town or city in West Yorkshire, compared to Leeds’s score of 42, Huddersfield, 67 and Wakefield 76.
Bradford also had a higher overall recovery index score than London, Birmingham and Edinburgh.
The date covers the period from February 13 to July 7, 2020.
Several places saw a genuine ‘Super Saturday’ with city centre footfall higher than the three-week average period before lockdown. These were: Basildon 104; Birkenhead 103; Chatham 95; Burnley 93.
Meanwhile, Bradford had a workers’ recovery index score of 26, weekend recovery index of 79 and a night-time recovery index of 56. These compare to table-topping Basildon’s extra figures in the same categories of 47, 105 and 82 respectively.
The weak city centre recovery that the data shows in larger cities across the UK suggests that many people are remaining in their local neighbourhoods rather than heading into the centre.
London city centre saw the smallest Super Saturday footfall of any city or large town in the UK – footfall on July 4 was at just 21 per cent of pre-lockdown levels.
The next release of data on the recovery of the UK’s high streets and city centres will be around the beginning of August.
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