Journal · 25 August 2025
Bank holiday Mondays on Yorkshire high streets
Breighton is not Leeds, and a market town Monday is not a city one. Groups that average bank holidays across sites flatten the very pattern owners need to see.
We work from Breighton. That does not make every group a market-town group, but it does mean we refuse to treat a bank holiday Monday as a national mood. In a city site, the day can book like a Saturday, with colour and nails from late morning. In a town that empties toward the coast, the same Monday can be a skeleton rota and a closed spa floor.
Groups that average the day across sites produce a polite number that helps nobody write a rota. The useful artefact is a site list: who opened, who should have opened, who took a walk-in rush at 11:00 and then sat empty after two. We would rather you see three different Mondays than one blended ‘bank holiday performance’.
Weather sits in the margin. We do not pretend to isolate it. What we can do is keep the same bank holiday in the same column for each site, and note local fixtures — a race meeting, a festival, a closed multi-storey. Owners already know these. They forget them when the books are exported without the paper calendar on the staff-room wall.
If your group straddles Yorkshire and further south, say so at the start. Travel for a site visit is ordinary for us. Averaging those sites as if they shared a high street is not.