Alive After Five

NE1 was uniquely well-positioned to put together a package attractive to both businesses and consumers. It included retailers extending opening hours until 8pm during the week, free parking after 5pm in 7 multi-storey car parks across the city, and a range of attractive offers, backed up by a heavyweight marketing campaign.

The return on NE1’s £2.5m investment has been extraordinary and continues to be felt across the city, as demonstrated by the fact that more than 70 restaurants opened within the city centre during the initiative's duration.

This illustrates that the commercial impact of Alive after Five has reached far beyond the city’s retail sector, with restaurants, bars, theatres, and cinemas all seeing increases in revenues too. The city's two universities and its professional services firms were also strongly supportive of the initative as their students and employees respectively benefitted from the attractive city centre experience which Alive after Five facilitated.

Newcastle’s daytime and nighttime economies now complement each other, providing a compelling early evening offer in the city that caters to a far wider demographic, and NE1 is rightly proud of the impact Alive after Five had on this.