Businesses Get Student Eye View of City

17th March 2022

This week saw 8 city centre businesses joining our event on Lancaster University Campus to ‘Meet the Students’ and hear their thoughts on Lancaster city centre.

 

The two-hour session was well attended with 24 students sharing their views and helping businesses to get into their minds to understand what they wanted from Lancaster and their businesses and what hurdles were stopping them coming into the city centre.

 

The businesses found the event very informative and gave them some insights to take away to consider what they could do to attract more students to their premises. Key points identified included:

 

• Some find the cost of public transport into the city centre is too expensive to use on a regular basis.
• Some international students said opening hours were an issue.
• Students don’t know where to access information about the city centre so don’t know what is happening when or where.
• Many students who live on campus tend to only come into the city centre on Wednesdays and Saturdays – mostly for grocery shopping.
• Most first year students tend to stick to the national brands which they already know and trust.
• International students would welcome an informative tour of Lancaster to learn about the city culturally and to find out where everything is in a safe environment.

 

All eight businesses which took part really took away things they can work on for their own businesses. Lancaster BID also took away many leaning points and will continue to work with the Management School and the University to really try and engage with as many of the 16,000 students and 3,000 staff as we can and develop ways to draw more of them into the city centre.