Can the ‘next Bicester Village’ take off without tourists?

Retail footfall will be the first measure of recovery this spring. Everywhere I look, from central London to small-town Yorkshire, shopkeepers who survived the winter cull have been dusting their counters, cleaning their windows — and waiting in their doorways for the crowd of customers who have accumulated £150 billion of savings during lockdown and, despite the cornucopia of online offerings, can’t wait to start browsing and shopping for real again.

Indications were mixed at the beginning of the week, with numbers still down on pre-pandemic levels, but at least the stock market is buying the theory. The FTSE 350 General Retailers index, which includes the likes of Dixons Carphone, Dunelm, JD Sports, Marks & Spencer and Pets at Home, is up 10 per cent in the last month and 75 per cent from its first lockdown low in March last year.

But which will do better: big-name chains or local independents with lower overheads and no debt? My feeling is that renewed physical shopping habits will favour the latter. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be an investor in giant malls — following the collapse into administration last year of Intu, owner of the Trafford Centre, Lakeside and Gateshead’s Metro Centre, the Hammerson property group is selling off a portfolio of UK retail parks at written-down values to a brave private equity player from Canada.

Bravest of all, I’d say, are the punters behind the new £160 million McArthurGlen Designer Outlet West Midlands which opened this week with 80 branded stores and a free car park somewhere off the A460. It’s ‘the best thing to happen to Cannock’, we’re told, and the next Bicester Village — but without the million Chinese visitors a year that made Bicester a pre-pandemic retail phenomenon, it’s going to need a sustained stampede of local bargain hunters.