Shopping and leisure were once synonymous in the UK. If the offer’s right, they still are.

There was a time, probably a decade or more ago, when shopping was officially designated the UK’s preferred leisure pastime. Yet with numbers from the BRC released a week ago claiming that out-of-town footfall fell by 1.9% between May and July, you could be forgiven for thinking that the British love affair with shops and shopping was over.
Yet the picture is patchy and in certain locations you just can’t move for those seeking a new retail experience. Such was the case yesterday in Hampton, a new “township” (according to the blurb on the website) on the southern fringes of Peterborough. Here, a new branch of garden centre Dobbies has opened and on Bank Holiday Monday the car park was full and wardens were turning traffic away - most of which was then heading for the Tesco Extra car park opposite. Tesco may own Dobbies, but it cannot have filled the Extra store manager’s heart with goodwill to see his car park filling up with shoppers bound for the store across the roundabout (although it’s hard not to imagine that planning permission for Dobbies may have had something to do with the fact that there was already a Tesco in situ).
For those who did make it into Dobbies, it was a case of fighting the crowds to get into the restaurant and then browsing everything from the greetings card gondola to the pot plants by way of the eco-centre, the first of its kind in a UK garden centre apparently. This was the UK at play and shopping, with the two being broadly synonymous - it was like a throwback to a different age.
All it really proved is that shoppers will turn out in force if the environment and the offer measure up. There is a general sense of gloom abroad currently, backed by some pretty lacklustre figures, but show shoppers something different, be it Dobbies or the new Next Home and Garden in Shoreham, and the great British day out equates to jumping in the car and heading once more for the shops. Bank Holiday Monday is, of course, a day when many choose to go shopping, but it’s a fair bet that Dobbies was siphoning off many who might have headed for the high street - where it is a racing certainty there were many showing the same old same old and complaining about the lack of customers.