Archetypes of Footfall Context: Quantifying Temporal Variations in Retail Footfall in relation to Micro-Location Characteristics

The UK retail sector is constantly changing and evolving. The increasing share of online sales and the development of out-of-town retail provision, in conjunction with the 2008–09 economic crisis, have disproportionately impacted high streets and physical retail negatively. Understanding and adapting to these changes is fundamental to the vitality, sustainability and prosperity of businesses, communities and the economy. However, there is a need for better information to support attempts to revitalise UK high streets and retail centres, and advances in sensor technology have made this possible. Footfall provides a commonly used heuristic of retail centre vitality and can be increasingly estimated in automated ways through sensing technology. However, footfall counts are influenced by a range of externalities such as aspects of retail centre function, morphology, connectivity and attractiveness. The key contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how footfall patterns are expressed within the varying context of different retail centre architypes providing both a useful tool for benchmarking and planning; but also making a theoretical contribution to the understanding of retail mobilities. This paper integrates a range of contextual data to develop a classification of footfall sensor locations; producing three representations of sensor micro-locations across Great Britain: chain and comparison retail micro-locations, business and independent micro-locations and value-orientated convenience retail micro-locations. These three groups display distinct daily and weekly footfall magnitudes and distributions, which are attributed to micro-locational differences in their morphology, connectivity and function.