Tills and thrills How shopping centres are being reinvented

There was a time when the most active thing to do at a shopping centre was jostle to the front of the queue at Primark.

- Sarah Butler

But developers are increasingly bringing in activities from zip wires to cricket, football, rock climbing and even wild swimming to draw in consumers and use space no longer wanted by retailers.

While the trend for competitive socialising, such as crazy golf, darts or bowling, is well established and gyms are commonplace in shopping centres, landlords are getting more creative with the type of activity they are offering as they battle declining interest in the actual physical shopping.

The activities are varied. Toca Social hosts diners who also want to watch and play football in three UK shopping centres. The US group Five Iron, which blends hi-tech golf simulators with a bar, has signed up for the first of at least 10 UK sites, at Broadgate in central London.

Even the zip-line adventure operators Zip World and Go Ape are understood to be talking to landlords about adding experiences to shopping centres.

Such operators are helping to fill the holes in shopping centres left by the closure of hundreds of department stores and other retailers following the switch to online shopping and more working from home. A fifth of the former Debenhams sites remain vacant, for example, more than four years after the chain exited the high street, while several former House of Fraser shops still stand empty.

Footfall has fallen in all but three of the last 12 months in shopping centres and was down 0.9% in October, according to the British Retail Consortium survey with the monitoring firm Sensormatic.