Bury St Edmunds town centre is ‘bucking the national trend’ as it recorded its busiest Christmas shopping period in more than a decade.
Our Bury St Edmunds Business Improvement District (BID) has a footfall camera in Abbeygate Street and the average number of people recorded each week in December was about 88,500.
It was the highest, for the weeks before Christmas, since 2012 when records started, with 2,000 more people per week than December 2023 and almost 13,000 more per week than in 2019.
The Our Bury St Edmunds Christmas lights switch-on. Picture: Bury Free Press
Meanwhile, 750,000 people visited the arc Shopping Centre in December – an increase of more than 14 per cent on 2023.
Footfall at the arc overall last year, which saw the opening of Primark and Everyman cinema at the former Debenhams, shot up 22 per cent to more than 7.5 million.
Mark Cordell, chief executive of Our Bury St Edmunds, said figures for towns across the UK showed there was a 0.5 per cent improvement in footfall numbers in December but in Bury it was 2.2 per cent.
Mark Cordell, chief executive of Our Bury St Edmunds Business Improvement District. Picture: Our Bury St Edmunds/Phil Morley
“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,” he said.
The BID recently commissioned data around the presence of mobile phones in the town centre which found people tend to spend about an hour and 45 minutes on a visit, a similar amount of time to the same quarter in 2023.
The data revealed 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 opening of Primark at the arc Shopping Centre in Bury St Edmunds. Picture: Mark WestleyAllan Hassell, centre manager of the arc. Picture: Mark Westley
Allan Hassell, centre manager at the arc, said: “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.”