Christmas shopper numbers up in Bury St Edmunds
Christmas shoppers in Bury St Edmunds helped to make the town the busiest it’s been in December for more than a decade. Footfall recorded in Abbeygate Street by the Business Improvement District (BID) organisation Our Bury St Edmunds was the highest for the weeks before Christmas since 2012, when records started.
The average number of people visiting through that entry point to the town centre each week in December was around 88,500, which is approximately 2,000 more per week than December 2023 and almost 13,000 more per week than at the same time in 2019 before the pandemic.
Chief Executive of Our Bury St Edmunds BID, Mark Cordell said: “Figures for towns across the UK show there was an 0.5% improvement in footfall numbers in December 2024 but in Bury St Edmunds it was 2.2%. Saturday remains the busiest day of the week for footfall unsurprisingly, but I am pleased to see that Tuesdays also saw an increase, which may well be connected to our Free After Three parking initiative and a number of shops participating in late night shopping on Tuesdays ahead of Christmas.
“We have more recently commissioned some other data around the presence of mobile phones in the town centre which has shown that people tend to spend around an hour and 45 minutes on a visit, a similar amount of time to the same quarter in 2023. This data also shows that in the last three months of 2024 more people were visiting Bury St Edmunds on average per day than the numbers for the East of England or the UK.”
The figures have been welcomed by the Centre Manager at arc Shopping Centre
Allan Hassell who commented: “In December 2024 we saw three quarters of a million people visiting arc Shopping Centre, which is an increase of more than 14% on December 2023. Overall, during 2024 our total footfall increased over 22%, to more than seven and a half million.
“Whilst businesses are likely to face additional pressures and challenges in 2025, I am hopeful that arc and Bury St Edmunds will continue to buck the national trend, with a likely increase to over eight million people through the arc in total.”
The Our Bury St Edmunds footfall figures are calculated based on an entry point to the town on Abbeygate Street. They are compiled for the BID by MRI OnLocation. More information is available at www.ourburystedmunds.com.
