Footfall in shops and parks in Islington has been slower to return to normal than those in other London boroughs, a Covid-19 community report has indicated.
The data produced by Google shows how visits to places, such as corner shops and parks, are changing in each geographic region.
As restrictions tighten across the capital, footfall is beginning to decrease once more.
The Reports are produced using aggregated, anonymised data from mobile devices whose users have the ‘Location History’ setting turned on, and are being released regularly by the company “to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19”.
‘Retail and recreation’ locations are defined as “places such as restaurants, cafés, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries and cinemas”.
According to Borough Business Profiles data released by London Councils and the Centre for Business and Economic Research (CEBR) in February, Islington has one of the highest rates of ‘business density’ in London. Visits to retail locations may therefore be more reliant on commuting workers — who have largely stopped travelling into central London offices, according to a wider FT analysis of the same Google data — than on borough residents.
The CEBR profiles also note that the “professional, scientific and technical sector is the most prominent in Islington…with strong representation from management consultancies, architectural, architectural and engineering and advertising firms”. ‘White-collar’ jobs in these industries are more able to be done remotely, depressing the amount of regular traffic to local retail businesses and amenities in the area.
