It’s not a subject I have really considered, but shoes are big business. My mate John Lyle has some new ones which he blogged about (apparently they’re not that comfortable – but keep that under your hat).
Not John Lyles new shoes
Apparently the market for shoes in the UK is worth £5.6bn. Wow. And it grew in 2010 by around 2.3%. Shoe Zone sell 57 pairs every minute of every day – or 30 million pairs each year.
There are 4,500 shoe shops in the UK and around 31% are independent.
In the league table of number of shops, Nottingham comes in 7th place behind London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds. We are ahead of Sheffield, Edinburgh and Liverpool who make up the Top 10. Nottingham has 50 shoe shops and we have a higher number of Independents (34%) than the National average.
Nottingham remains strong in retailing terms generally (ranked 5th in the CACI survey). I guess that the shoe shop survey just confirms this position.
In the last few weeks I think the opening announcements about Jamie’s Italian and Carluccio’s will help keep Nottingham’s profile high in the wider UK population’s mind. But keeping a presence in these surveys will do us no harm. In retailing terms we seem to be punching above our weight. And that’s without the major Broad Marsh development. The work being done there should help us stay in the Top 5?
I think that had Westfield done the big scheme we would have probably climbed into the top 3… but that’s another story for another day!
Thanks for the plug Tim!
On the retailing front, your own Innes England Market Insite report (which is rather excellent by the way) also talks of CSC, the owners of the Victoria centre looking into an expansion. That would strengthen our retailing position even further and give it the lift it needs to stop people drifting off to Birmingham or even Derby.
No probelm John – I will mention to the designers of the Insite your compliments!
4,500 shoes shops in the UK? At least 4,499 of those are on Bridlesmith Gate…
It sometimes feels that way!!