Festive records delight for Cambridge’s Grand Arcade shopping centre
The Grand Arcade’s festive season built on an action-packed 2024, with 8.5 per cent more visitors between 28 October and 22 December than in the same 2023 period – and a one-day peak of 70,000 shoppers on 17 December.
The premier Cambridge retail destination also enjoyed a string of industry and community awards during the year, acknowledging its industry-leading marketing, community and environmental achievements.
Earlier in December, the Grand Arcade team received two prestigious awards from the national trade association Revo, focusing on the centre’s groundbreaking ‘Let’s Go Circular’ campaign, and ‘Grand Discoveries’ programme. Launched in 2022, Let’s Go Circular was the UK’s first shopping centre campaign aimed at promoting the principle of the circular economy and has gone from strength to strength since.
With input from 60 organisations, and hosting more than 80 activations, Let’s Go Circular delivered 800 hours of interactive content – including pop-ups focusing on reusing and reloving vintage clothing, events discussing the need to regenerate diverse wildlife habitats, and a ‘human library’ with free advice on transforming buildings into an eco-home. A circular fashion show supported refugees, and workshops showed how to repair your clothes. Live demonstrations revealed how to avoid food waste.
Outside of the Revo’s, Let’s Go Circular was also awarded the industry’s Green Apple Environment Awards’ National Gold & National Champion gongs, and the Grand Arcade won the inaugural Cambridge Independent Business Awards’ Green Award in September.
A run of new entrants opened in 2024 including B-corp certified Rituals, one of the UK’s leading high-end beauty brands, which opened in May, and Scamp & Dude, another B-corp certified business born in the UK, which opened its fifth UK store in the centre in July.
Further expanding the centre’s extensive fashion line-up, Beyond Retro – the pioneering vintage and preloved clothing company – joined the Grand Arcade community in October, providing two floors of vintage clothing. In November, Miele opened a dedicated store – featuring its eighth UK ‘Miele Experience Centre’ – in the shopping centre.
And of course, Everyman launched its first cinema in Cambridgeshire in November with a blockbuster party. Labelled Britain’s ‘bougiest new cinema’, Everyman is spread over more than 15,000 sq ft at the centre, and continues to attract visitors from across the East of England.
The 8.5 per cent increase in visitor numbers far outpaces the national retail sector, which averaged a 2.8 per cent decline in footfall over the same timeframe.
Martin Macwhinnie, centre manager for Grand Arcade, said: “To say it’s been a big year for Grand Arcade is an understatement.
“The new arrivals we have welcomed and the awards we have received really acknowledge the growing role Grand Arcade has played in this community.
“The exchanges and interaction we have enjoyed through Let’s Go Circular and Grand Discoveries programmes have been what has really motivated us, and we have been rewarded with more visits from our shoppers and our recent record-breaking footfall – against a backdrop of reduced shopping visits nationally. Cambridge really has done us proud, and we look forward to more in 2025.”
