For decades, the traditional formula for a successful high street or shopping centre was relatively straightforward: attract the right retailers, provide convenient access, add food and beverage, and let shopping generate the footfall.

That formula is changing.

Consumers can now purchase almost anything without leaving home. In Great Britain, online transactions accounted for 27.4% of total retail sales in 2025, compared with just 3.4% in 2007. Ecommerce is no longer an alternative channel sitting alongside physical retail; it is a permanent part of how people buy.¹

This does not mean that people no longer want physical destinations. It means those destinations need to provide a stronger reason to visit.

That distinction could be fundamental to the next phase of high-street and shopping-centre development.

Physical destinations need to offer something the internet cannot

Online shopping is remarkably effective at completing transactions. It can provide price comparison, enormous product choice, home delivery and increasingly sophisticated personalisation. Trying to compete with ecommerce purely on the ability to sell products is therefore becoming harder.

But there are things a website cannot fully reproduce.

People still want to meet friends, spend time with their families, compete, celebrate birthdays, discover something new and share experiences together.

This changes the question for landlords and destination operators.

Entertainment has an important role to play in answering that question.

From shopping destination to experience destination

There is already evidence of this transition. Savills reported that UK retail footfall improved across high streets, shopping centres and retail parks during the first three quarters of 2025. More interestingly, entertainment spending in the dataset it analysed increased 23% year-on-year, significantly ahead of several traditional retail categories.²

Cushman & Wakefield’s research into UK experiential leisure reaches a similar conclusion. It describes experiential leisure as an increasingly important part of the UK’s retail and urban landscape and identifies opportunities for further growth in regional cities that remain under-supplied relative to potential demand.³

This suggests that the opportunity is larger than simply replacing an empty shop with an entertainment operator.

Entertainment can potentially change the purpose of the destination itself.

From tenant mix to destination mix

Entertainment can create the trip

One of the most important distinctions between conventional retail and entertainment is visit intent.

A customer may walk past several shops before deciding whether to enter one. A booked entertainment experience works differently.

A family travelling to an escape room, a group of friends booking an interactive gaming experience, teenagers visiting an esports venue or colleagues attending competitive social entertainment have already made a decision to travel to the location.

The entertainment becomes the reason for the journey.

Once they arrive, however, their spending does not necessarily end at the attraction. They may eat before the experience, buy drinks afterwards, visit nearby retailers, use other services or simply spend longer within the destination.

Cushman & Wakefield refers to this complementary footfall as the “halo and gravity effect”, noting that experiential leisure can both help address large persistent vacant units and generate traffic that benefits the wider placemaking environment.³

Its wider contribution may include:

• additional footfall;
• longer dwell time;
• repeat visitation;
• cross-spend across food, beverage, retail and services;
• stronger destination identity.

High streets have a particular opportunity

Many UK high streets provide plenty of functional reasons to visit. There may be cafés, restaurants, hairdressers, beauty services, convenience stores, professional services and traditional retail.

What can sometimes be missing is a meaningful activity layer.

What does a family do after lunch? Where can teenagers meet that does not revolve solely around food? What can a group of friends actually do together for 60 or 90 minutes? What creates a reason for someone from the neighbouring town to visit this particular high street rather than another?

These are placemaking questions as much as entertainment questions.

A high street does not necessarily need a 50,000-square-foot family entertainment centre to begin addressing them. Depending on catchment, property and audience, the answer could be a compact immersive attraction, competitive socialising concept, escape-room cluster, interactive gaming venue, esports environment, digital sports concept, family activity centre or a combination of formats.

The opportunity is to start thinking about entertainment infrastructure at town-centre level, rather than regarding leisure as something that belongs exclusively inside large destination malls.

Shopping centres have a different challenge

Shopping centres often already include some form of leisure. But the existence of entertainment does not automatically mean that entertainment is being used strategically.

A cinema, bowling venue or children’s attraction placed in a low-visibility upper floor or at the end of an underperforming corridor may fill space, but that is different from deliberately using entertainment to influence movement through the scheme.

Visibility matters. Adjacency matters. Food-and-beverage relationships matter. Arrival routes matter.

Even the journey from the car park or public transport entrance to the attraction can influence which neighbouring businesses benefit from the traffic.

For landlords, this means entertainment strategy should ideally start before a vacant unit is simply offered to an operator. The attraction type, audience, location and surrounding tenant mix should be considered together.

Activity creates a reason to visit

Vacant retail space can become productive experience space

Changes in the retail sector are also producing interesting physical opportunities. Retailers continue to rationalise and right-size portfolios, while some shopping centres and town centres are left with units that were designed around traditional retail formats.

Experiential leisure has a useful characteristic in this environment: many concepts can absorb larger spaces that would otherwise be difficult to repurpose.

Cushman & Wakefield specifically identifies experiential leisure as a potential asset-management solution for large persistent voids. McKinsey has similarly highlighted underutilised space in malls, city centres, cinemas and other real-estate environments as potential locations for smaller-format or temporary location-based entertainment.³⁴

But this should not become: “We have an empty unit; let’s put entertainment there.”

The stronger approach is: “We have an opportunity to change how this part of the destination is used. What experience would create demand here?”

Those are very different starting points.

Not every entertainment concept needs to be permanent

Another opportunity for landlords is the increasing flexibility of location-based entertainment.

Historically, leisure anchors tended to mean relatively permanent formats such as cinemas, bowling centres or large FECs. The market is becoming much broader.

Pop-up immersive experiences, seasonal attractions, gaming competitions, temporary esports events, branded experiences and smaller technology-led attractions can allow property owners to activate spaces without immediately committing to a conventional long-term leisure model.

McKinsey’s 2026 analysis of location-based entertainment highlights smaller regional, seasonal and pop-up experiences as potential ways to activate underutilised spaces in malls and city centres, with lower investment requirements and greater flexibility than major destination attractions.⁴

For property owners, this creates the possibility of an entertainment portfolio rather than simply an entertainment tenant.

A destination might combine permanent anchors with shorter-term activations that change throughout the year. That keeps the proposition fresh and can create new reasons for repeat visitation.

Changing expectations reinforce the shift

This is not about designing a destination around one generation, but changing consumer expectations reinforce the broader argument.

JLL research found that 84% of Gen Z respondents agreed that cities need to offer new experiences to remain relevant, compared with 60% across all generations.⁵

The implication is not that retail disappears. It is that retail increasingly operates within a wider ecosystem of shopping, eating, playing, competing, socialising and experiencing.

The destinations capable of combining these behaviours effectively may have a stronger proposition than those relying heavily on transactional retail alone.

Entertainment should not be treated as leftover space

There is a risk in the current enthusiasm around experiential leisure. Entertainment is not automatically successful.

A poorly selected attraction can fail just as easily as a poorly selected retailer. Catchment demographics matter. Disposable income matters. Competition matters. Parking and transport matter. Pricing matters. Visibility matters. Operating costs matter. Capacity matters.

And perhaps most importantly, the concept must match the destination.

A neighbourhood high street does not need the same entertainment proposition as a regional shopping centre. A city-centre mixed-use scheme aimed at young adults does not need the same proposition as a suburban destination serving families.

This is why entertainment should be part of the destination strategy, rather than simply a leasing decision.

The process should start by understanding who is already visiting, who is currently missing, when footfall is weakest, what surrounding businesses need, what spaces are available and what experience could realistically generate additional visits.

Only then should the attraction format be determined.

A new type of anchor

The traditional retail anchor was designed primarily to attract shoppers.

The next generation of anchors may need to attract people first and allow shopping to become one of several activities that follow.

That could fundamentally change how landlords think about entertainment.

That includes direct rental income, but also potentially increased footfall, stronger food-and-beverage demand, longer dwell time, improved use of previously weak areas, greater destination awareness and an enhanced proposition for future tenants.

Entertainment therefore does not need to replace retail.

It can help give retail a stronger environment in which to operate.

The opportunity for landlords and operators

The evolution of the high street will not be solved by entertainment alone.

Successful destinations still require the right combination of retail, hospitality, services, public realm, transport, community activity and commercial management.

But entertainment deserves a much more deliberate place within that mix.

As transactional shopping continues moving online, physical destinations must increasingly compete for something more valuable than a transaction: people’s time.

And people are more likely to give their time to places that give them something meaningful to do.

For high streets, shopping centres and mixed-use developments, that may be one of the most important opportunities in the next generation of placemaking.