ST ANNES FOOTFALL

St Annes is a seaside resort town located in the Fylde borough. It is renowned for its historic grid layout, Victorian Pier, beautifully laid-out Victorian gardens, and a large sandy beach, which families love.

The town features a wide, central high street hosting many independent retailers, service providers, and eating establishments to suit all tastes. It is well connected by car, bus, and train, with the train station within the town centre. Blackpool, Lytham, and the motorway network connect St Annes well, and new M55 access routes have vastly improved commute time.

St Annes relies predominantly on the younger family-focused tourism sector. The town also has a growing number of quality antiques, vintage, and art collectors, which draws older age groups and specialists.

Adjacent business parks accommodate a mix of SMEs, larger enterprises, and trade warehouses, providing significant employment opportunities for residents.

St Annes has seen changes in the retail space over the last ten years, from multiples moving out to boutique independents opening up. The evening economy is prospering, and significant private investment is being made in many of the town’s key buildings. Footfall data, gathered via geo-location-enabled mobile devices, provides an estimate of visitor traffic, with blue and red zones on the accompanying map delineating the captured areas and main streets, respectively.

Please click on the images to produce a larger image in a pop up window.

This table shows the indicative numbers of people (with mobile devices enabled) who visited St Annes during the month. This also includes residents and workers who shop, have their hair cut, visit the pub, post office, beachfront, pier, etc., and all this foot traffic, mostly with spending involved, benefits the local economy.

This graph shows the indicative numbers of people (with mobile devices enabled) who have visited St Annes over the last few years. You can see the effect that Covid and the Winter months have had on the local economy. St Annes benefits from a strong visitor economy, especially in the Spring and Summer economy, whereas it relies on a more local economy during the darker months.

This chart shows how St Annes is performing in the footfall growth number stakes against other towns in the North West and UK. This figure varies from month to month. St Annes is still in the negative in terms of growth, but on the whole is performing well against other UK and North West towns.

Dwell time refers to the time a shopper or visitor spends in a town centre, event, shopping centre, or individual store. It is a crucial metric to appreciate because the longer visitors stay in a location, the more money they tend to spend. Extended stays (over 40 minutes) is encouraged through attractive and well-maintained high streets, high-quality retail and hospitality venues with excellent customer service, interesting artisan markets, and engaging visitor experiences such as events and town trails.

Additional incentives, like loyalty card schemes, markets, events and other activities further motivate visitors to prolong their stay and make repeat visits, benefiting multiple businesses on the high street by attracting the same customers repeatedly.

St Annes performed fairly well on dwell time in June 2024, with 40% of visits being over 40 minutes long, 28% being 20-40 minutes long, and shorter visits of less than 20 minutes accounting for 32% of town centre visits.

To help improve the dwell and spend time in St Annes, a Loyalty Card Scheme was introduced in 2023 and free business support is available. These initiatives have been widely publicised. Fylde Council has also approved a new regeneration scheme of some £3m to create a new event square to increase activity generation through events and markets. Fylde Council, St Annes Town Council and several local community groups are currently planning events to utilise the new square and searching for new events and market hosts. Collectively, all this activity should help improve the upper dwell times needed to increase the spend potential in St Annes.

Where do visitors to our towns come from and why does this matter?

It is important for both the private and public sectors to appreciate where a town and, indeed, borough footfall, originates from to conduct target marketing. Marketing, whether this be digital media, paper/poster advertising, or social media is conducted to entice both shoppers, visitors, as well as investors and new businesses.

Marketers can source their own data to examine footfall demographics in-depth, but the town’s main postcode statistics provided indicate potential areas for marketing activity to assist with improving customer loyalty and repeat visits.

The maps provided here show the extent of the origins of the postcode area for those visiting St Annes. See the scales to the right of the images. The circles indicate the mile radius to provide scale. The blue and red depict the density volume of those visiting.