Hospitality is keeping Town Centres alive. But ghost kitchens, delivery apps, and outdoor eating mean much of it never shows up in the data.
If you walk down a typical UK high street today, the change is obvious. The department stores are gone or going. The banks have closed. The mobile phone shops have thinned out. What has filled the gaps, in town after town, is food and drink. Cafés, restaurants, independent food businesses, street food operators, takeaway outlets, and – less visibly – ghost kitchens running delivery-only operations behind shuttered shopfronts.
Hospitality is playing an increasingly central role on the modern high street. In many towns, it is no longer a secondary attraction or a nice addition to the retail mix – it is one of the primary reasons people visit a Town Centre at all. It is the sector keeping commercial rents viable in units that would otherwise sit empty, extending trading hours into the evening, and pulling visitors into spaces they might not otherwise use.
So how well is this activity actually being captured? If hospitality is increasingly what drives footfall, spend, and the reason people visit – does the data reflect that?
Ghost kitchens generate value but zero footfall
Ghost kitchens – delivery-only operations with no customer-facing shopfront – are one of the fastest-growing formats in UK hospitality. They are commercially logical: lower overheads, no front-of-house costs, flexible scaling. For national chains, they offer a way to enter new markets without the risk of a full restaurant fit-out. For high streets, they fill empty units, maintain commercial activity, and generate employment.
But from a Town Centre measurement perspective, they do not exist. No customers walk in. No footfall is generated at the door. No dwell time is recorded. There is no halo effect on the surrounding street – no passing trade, no browsing, no “while I’m here” visits to neighbouring shops. The unit is occupied, the kitchen is active, delivery riders are coming and going – but the traditional metrics see nothing.
A high street with three ghost kitchens and two empty units looks very different economically from a high street with five empty units – but in a footfall report, they can appear identical. Meanwhile, the cafés, restaurants, and food markets that do generate footfall often produce a higher average spend per visitor than traditional retail. The full picture only emerges when you combine footfall with spend data, movement patterns, and occupancy – and start to understand who is visiting, not just how many.
The meal has left the building
Ghost kitchens are only part of the measurement gap. The other part is where food is actually being consumed.
Takeaway culture has fundamentally changed the geography of hospitality. A customer buys a coffee on the high street and drinks it in the park. A family picks up fish and chips and eats on the promenade. A group of office workers orders from three different outlets and meets on the benches by the market square. The transaction happens in one place. The experience – the dwell time, the social activity, the reason the visit feels worthwhile – happens somewhere else entirely.
This is not a marginal behaviour. In many Town Centres, particularly on warm days and during events, outdoor eating is the dominant form of hospitality engagement. People are spending money on the high street and consuming it in the green space next door. The high street gets the revenue. The green space gets the visitors. Understanding this relationship means measuring both – tracking footfall and dwell time in parks and public spaces alongside the spend data from the high street, so the connection between hospitality transaction and visitor experience becomes visible.
If you are a BID manager trying to justify investment in public realm – better seating, more bins, improved lighting in the park – you need to show that people are using those spaces and that hospitality spend is flowing through them. That means having comprehensive data across the full Town Centre footprint, including green spaces and public realm, not just shop frontages.
The evening economy is a different town centre entirely
There is a further dimension that deserves serious attention: time of day. The high street at 11am on a Tuesday and the high street at 8pm on a Friday are functionally different places. The retail offer is closed. The hospitality offer is open. The visitor profile is different. The behaviour is different. The economic contribution is different. Restaurants and bars generate their highest spend after the shops have shut. Ghost kitchens and delivery riders peak between 6pm and 9pm. The data volumes may be thinner than during daytime retail hours, but the economic activity is real and increasingly significant – and understanding it requires time-of-day analysis as standard, not as an afterthought.
A Town Centre that appears to be declining on a daytime footfall dashboard may have a growing evening economy that tells a completely different story. A BID that can quantify its evening hospitality value has a much stronger hand when making the case for investment. And a council deciding whether to fund evening lighting, late-running transport, or extended licensing needs time-of-day evidence to make that decision well.
Town Centres are changing. Measure what’s actually driving them.
When department stores were the anchor tenants, entire Town Centre strategies revolved around them. Footfall was measured at their doors. Car parks were sized for their customers. Bus routes were planned around their trading hours. The measurement framework matched the reality of what drove the place.
Hospitality is increasingly occupying that role – but the measurement approach needs to keep pace. Town Centres that are succeeding because of their food and drink offer need comprehensive data to prove it. The ghost kitchen generating fifty delivery orders an hour is invisible to a footfall counter. The park where half the high street’s takeaway food gets eaten needs to be measured as part of the same system. The evening economy needs the same rigour as the daytime retail offer.
Managing a modern Town Centre means understanding hospitality as the increasingly important driver it has become – not treating it as a secondary category in a retail-centric reporting model. That means tracking movement across the full footprint, including green spaces and public realm, not just the shop frontages. It means measuring spend patterns that flow between indoor and outdoor spaces. It means understanding the evening as a distinct economy with its own visitors, its own rhythms, and its own value.
The high street is changing. The data that informs its management should change with it.
Place Informatics helps Town Centres, BIDs, Local Authorities, and hospitality brands understand how food, drink, and leisure activity shapes place performance – across the full day, the full footprint, and including green spaces and public realm. Place360 brings together footfall, movement, spend analytics, dwell time, and visitor origin data to build a complete picture of how hospitality contributes to your location. If your Town Centre strategy needs to reflect the way your high street actually works now, get in touch.
Place Informatics provides location analytics, footfall intelligence, and behavioural insights for UK Town Centres, BIDs, Local Authorities, National Parks, and Tourism destinations.