UK: New Gravity Active Entertainment Location to Open at Westfield Stratford City

More and more shopping centers and malls are turning to retailtainment to offer customers an entertaining shopping experience and retain their loyalty (read also our special feature on the topic of “revitalizing stationary retail” in EAP 2/2020). Special leisure experiences and activity offerings are designed to extend the time customers spend on site and help attract visitors to the department store who do not come primarily to buy goods but are actually there for the entertainment on offer.

The Westfield Stratford City shopping center in east London will also soon have a new leisure attraction. A new activity park from the British provider Gravity Active Entertainment will open at the site operated by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), whose offerings mainly include trampoline areas, but also other sporting activities such as VR experiences, bowling, e-karting, street golf, gaming, etc. In addition to urban golf, AR darts, a high ropes course and arcade gaming, Stratford will also implement a unique karting concept in which two tracks can be operated either separately or in combination as one supertrack. For an investment of ten million British pounds, the entertainment concept will be implemented in the shopping center in Stratford on an area of approximately 5,500 square meters.

The largest Gravity facility to date is scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of this year, in the northwest of England, at the Liverpool ONE shopping, residential and leisure complex in Liverpool. Incidentally, the provider’s first location in Germany and thus in continental Europe can be found at the NOVA Leipzig shopping center, which opened there in 2021. (eap)