Beyond footfall: where retailers really outperform in London

Retailers have long relied on familiar signals to judge location performance: footfall, demographics, tenant mix, catchment spend.

Useful, but blunt.

Our unit-level banking data offers a more sophisticated measure of performance: it shows where retailers actually outperform their own estates, not just where they should perform well.

When we apply this lens to London, a clear pattern emerges.

The city's 10 strongest outperforming locations fall into three distinct Retail Place types, each offering very different strategic insights for retailers.

1) Rail Stations: intensity and impulse

London’s major rail hubs consistently rank among the top outperformers:

• King's Cross
• St Pancras
• Euston
• Waterloo
• Paddington

These locations combine extreme footfall intensity with a highly spend-ready customer mix. For many brands, they deliver trading levels significantly above estate averages, particularly in categories suited to convenience, gifting, food and premium impulse.

The Insight:
Rail stations aren’t just high-footfall locations, they are high-conversion environments. Unit-level data helps brands quantify that uplift and benchmark the true premium of station-based retail.

2) Retail Parks: unglamorous, but highly productive

Some of London’s strongest outperformers are not in prime high streets or flagship malls, but in retail parks:

• Purley Way North Retail Park
• Ruislip Retail Park
• Tower Retail Park
  

These locations often fly under the radar in traditional location analysis.
Yet unit-level performance data shows that categories like DIY, home, furniture and bulky goods consistently trade exceptionally well here.

The Insight:
Retail parks can deliver some of the most reliable and scalable performance in an estate, especially for space-hungry or destination-led categories. Data-driven benchmarking helps brands recognise value where traditional metrics might undervalue it.

3) Shopping Centres: concentrated demand

Major shopping centres also stand out:

• Westfield Stratford
• Brent Cross

These environments combine scale, brand adjacency and customer dwell time, creating pockets of sustained outperformance for fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands.

The Insight:
Not all centres are equal. Unit-level data reveals which centres genuinely drive above-estate performance, rather than simply looking strong on paper.

Why this matters

London isn’t a single retail market, and performance isn’t driven by one factor.

By moving beyond proxies and analysing real trading outcomes, retailers can:

• Identify micro-locations where they are most likely to outperform
• Compare fundamentally different Retail Place types on a like-for-like basis
• Challenge assumptions about where their best opportunities really lie
• Make expansion and optimisation decisions with defensible evidence

In short, sophisticated performance measurement reveals opportunities that traditional location analysis simply can’t see.

Interested in more detail?

Click this link to book a demo of our UK banking data platform and start de-risking your site selection today.

Author: Ben Purple, Director at GEOLYTIX

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash