Gravity Southside Heralds New Approach To Interactive Leisure, Helping Breathe Life Back Into The High Street

A deal by Gravity Active Entertainment, the fast-growing leisure and entertainment company based in Yorkshire, has been shortlisted at this Year’s Property Week Awards for the “Best deal of the year”. Winners will be announced in November.

Gravity opened its new 85,000 square foot entertainment venue at Southside shopping centre in Wandsworth, London in the Summer, having partnered with Southside’s joint owners, Landsec and Invesco Real Estate, to redevelop the existing space. The company has been deploying new, innovative technology to redefine the UK leisure experience and breathe life back into the high street, through evolving its highly profitable core offering of trampoline parks.

The new Wandsworth site offers the first all-electric, multi-level go kart track in a UK high-street environment and the first of its kind bowling alley in the UK with a choice of projected gaming images onto the alley to provide an interactive experience. There is also a 10-hole crazy golf experience using iconic images of New York, a Japanese noodle restaurant and a dedicated e-sports centre offering gamers every available game with a platform to compete against each other both within the venue and remotely. They are also innovating old fashioned pub games using modern technology, with a digital dart board and shuffleboard.

The venue will be family focused during the day, with live music and a high-end cocktail bar designed to attract a younger crowd in the evening to closing time. The aim is to bring together children, friends or even work colleagues through interactive fun.

Gravity will use the Wandsworth site as a model for reinvigorating the high street across dozens of new locations in the UK and abroad, to meet the growing demand for interactive leisure, and to bring people back to town and city centres and capitalise on vacant retail spaces. Gravity Wandsworth was previously a large Debenhams store on 4 levels.

The company now has 16 sites across the UK and has over half a million square foot of the high-street, with expectancy to be above the 1 million mark within the next 2 years. It has also just been named as RLI’s Entertainment & Leisure Operator of the Year.

Law firm Irwin Mitchell has advised Gravity on all its property matters.

James Knowles, Real Estate Partner and Head of Irwin Mitchell’s Northern Property Team said:

Expert Opinion

“Gravity is an exciting business. It is taking the high street by storm, turning underused retail space into state of the future leisure facilities for the whole community to enjoy. It’s a win for landlords, customers and the high street.

"We are proud to be working with such an innovative team as they expand further and wish them every success at the Property Week Awards next month.”
James Knowles - Partner

Irwin Mitchell has advised  Gravity on all property matters from its first scheme at Xscape Castleford in 2014 to its most recent scheme at the Galaxy Centre, Luton which opened in June 2021

Harvey Jenkinson, CEO at Gravity commented: “We are thrilled to be nominated for this award with Property Week. We are very proud of what we have created in Wandsworth and have already seen a 25% increase in footfall at the shopping centre. We hope to re-create this elsewhere in the UK and are looking at various other deals at the moment. We wouldn’t be able to do this without great advisors like Irwin Mitchell.”