Lane7 Group has opened a boutique bowling venue at Meadowhall, doubling its footprint across Sheffield and adding to the shopping centre’s leisure offer.
The new venue, on The Avenue, combines boutique bowling lanes with food and cocktails. It complements Lane7’s established city-centre site on Matilda Street and allows the competitive socialising operator to reach a broader audience across Sheffield, Rotherham and the wider South Yorkshire region.
Meadowhall welcomes more than 20 million visitors a year, and Lane7 had been looking for the right opportunity within the centre for several years to support the scale and quality of experience the group wanted to deliver.
The Meadowhall location forms part of Lane7 Group’s wider growth strategy, which combines new openings with opportunities to take over established sites in strong locations.
“We have wanted to be in Meadowhall for years as it is one of the country’s leading shopping and leisure destinations, with exceptional footfall and a genuinely regional catchment.
Gavin Hughes, Managing Director, Lane7 Group
This location significantly increases our presence in Sheffield. Our existing city-centre business has performed strongly, and Meadowhall gives us the opportunity to serve a different occasion and a much wider audience.
The move is another example of the consolidation taking place across competitive socialising. The market has developed quickly, but scale, operational capability and continued investment are becoming increasingly important. Lane7 is well positioned to take advantage of further opportunities as the sector matures.”
Lane7 joins a growing line-up of leisure operators at British Land’s Meadowhall, complementing a recent reinvestment by Vue and the forthcoming opening of Play Padel. On the retail side, the centre recently welcomed an expanded JD Sports flagship.
“Meadowhall is the dominant destination in the region, and in terms of its ability to attract and retain catchment spend, it’s actually the most dominant super regional centre across the entire UK. Having a quality leisure offer to maintain that position matters; we know people will travel further and spend more time here if we deliver that. Bringing in Lane7 was a strategic leasing move to serve an already broad catchment that has the potential to grow further, and its position on The Avenue will only be a positive thing for the high-calibre of retailers we have here.”
Richard Crowther, Retail Leasing Director, British Land
The group says it will continue to explore opportunities where it can add value through its brands, operating platform and experience in developing high-volume leisure venues.
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