20/11/2025
News
A planned and sustained programme of investment in Lincoln city centre is resulting in an uplift in rents in the retail and food & beverage sectors.
That’s the verdict of Eddisons - the property firm whose Lincoln office is on Westgate and whose agency specialists have undertaken a series of lettings, lease renewals and rent reviews in the city’s Cornhill Quarter and surrounding central area in, specifically, the past 18 months that has led to this conclusion.
In acting for a mix of landlords and tenants, Eddisons’ agents have witnessed a rebasing of rents upwards in the prime city centre areas in the past three years following a significant drop both pre- and immediately post-Covid.
In undertaking new lettings and lease advisory work around Lincoln’s Cornhill Quarter, Eddisons has seen Zone A rents (ITZAs) rise by approximately 15 per cent from where they were three years ago.
Rents in the Cornhill Quarter are now commanding in excess of £70 per sq ft (psf), an increase nudging just under 17 per cent from £60 psf just two to three years ago, while prime rents along the High Street have returned to pre-Covid levels at approximately £125 per sq ft.
High Street rents surrounding the Cornhill junction have felt, what Eddisons calls, the ‘Cornhill ripple effect’, with similar increases in psf rental levels - albeit more modest than in the immediate Cornhill area.
Beyond Guildhall Street, to the north, rents have remained relatively stable, with some modest increases. However, this area has witnessed a change in tenant profile with a stronger focus on food & beverage as opposed to traditional retailers.
The focus of investment in repurposing buildings in the core of Lincoln’s city centre, as well as the wholesale regeneration of older or larger buildings, has served to create a more appropriate supply/demand balance within the city’s other main retailing locations - plus a shift in the commercial offering.
More recently, the retail market across Lincoln has seen a reconcentration of demand around the pedestrianised sections around Cornhill and High Street. This is compared to the last five to 10 years where the retail offering was more stretched across the city, running from St Mark’s Square all the way to the top of the High Street.
With a number of national retailers relocating to more central positions, this has created occupier demand in these locations and placed upward pressure on rental values.
While acknowledging the uplift of rental values following substantial investment in this central part of Lincoln’s historic core, Eddisons cautions against assumptions that this trajectory will continue ever upwards.
Along with its property peers, and most commercial business sectors, the firm is looking to the forthcoming Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget Statement with a degree of uncertainty about its consequences.
Director James Straw, who has been involved in the agency’s lease advisory work in the hot-spot areas of Lincoln city centre, said, “Any measures that reduce disposable income will play out in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors, of course.
“While property investment on the kind of transformational scale we have witnessed in Lincoln’s central area always looks to long-term returns, there is no doubt that business support is still required to foster growth in the sector in the short and medium term.”
