West Bromwich shopping centre welcomes one million festive visitors
West Bromwich’s top shopping and leisure destination is on target to welcome over a million people during December.
New Square Shopping Centre, which celebrated its fifth birthday in July, experienced its busiest day of the year on Saturday, December 22 with footfall of just under 60,000.
Sunday, December 23 was the busiest Sunday of the centre’s history with an average of 6,500 visitors per hour between 11am and 5pm and Christmas Eve was also record breaking, with more than 51,000 visitors coming along for their last-minute Christmas shopping.
The footfall in the week leading up to Christmas – December 18 to 24 was 300,000 in total, with people enjoying both shopping and the centre’s restaurants and five-screen Odeon Cinema.
Extended opening hours during the week and the shopping centre’s Santa’s grotto proved a further draw to visitors. Special festive family entertainment was also staged in the build up this year.
Footfall for Boxing Day was 40,000 this year. People starting to queue for the Next sale at 1.30am and by the time the store opened its doors at 6am there were nearly 700 people waiting to be amongst the first inside.
New Square is now estimating that total footfall for the year will reach 10.2m, a two per cent increase on 2017, demonstrating that the centre is continuing to buck the national trend for reduced footfall.
Steve Burr, centre manager at New Square Shopping Centre since its opening day in 2013, said: “We’ve definitely seen an increased trend in last minute shopping this year, which is in part due to the extension of the ‘super weekend’, with Christmas Eve falling on a Monday, giving people three full days to shop before the big day. With some retailers sales starting early, people also used the immediate days before Christmas to enjoy some shopping for themselves, giving another big footfall boost.
“Because we have a good mix of both shopping and leisure, alongside a busy programme of family events in December, we also tend to see our visitors ‘making a day of it’ when they visit over the Christmas period.”
“Boxing Day has once again proved consistently popular with our visitors, and stores are already reporting strong sales, so we’re expecting a busy run into 2019 for the shopping centre.”
New Square has 1,900 parking spaces and 30 big name stores including Next, Primark, JD Sports and River Island.
Not all stores will be open when 2019 trading opens on New Year’s Day with the centre open 11am to 5pm .
Normal trading hours resume on Wednesday, January 2.
