Late rising, video calls and UK holidays — Britain’s ‘new normal’

Britons have responded to the coronavirus pandemic by embracing a “new normal” lifestyle that for many involves waking up later, hours of video calls, and an appreciation for domestic holidays, according to Financial Times analysis of real-time data.

And a year on from the start of the first Covid-19 lockdown, surveys point to people emerging from restrictions feeling happier than when the curbs were initially imposed.

Of all the lifestyle changes, most office workers’ shift to remote working may take the longest to reverse. Few had heard of the video software Zoom in February 2020, but Britons now visit its website around 25m times every week compared to just 1m times a year ago, according to web traffic data from SimilarWeb.

Among the reasons remote working may stick is that removing the commute allows for a later start to the day, a trend that stands out in energy use data. Total energy demand across Britain is back at pre-pandemic levels by lunchtime, but much lower than its old baseline in the mornings, especially between 7am and 8am.

The change in working patterns varies significantly, depending on where people live and their job.

Trips on trains and the London Underground are 80 per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels, but this figure hides nuance.

While the 8am-9am office rush hour has fallen away, a new morning peak has emerged between 7:30am and 8am, as those in construction and lower-paid service jobs head to work. Similarly, mornings on the roads are as busy as they ever were, suggesting both wariness of public transport and that some sectors are operating closer to normal.

City centres, deprived of their economic lifeblood of commuters and tourists, could take months to return to their pre-pandemic bustle, if they ever do. But many towns and rural areas may enjoy a swifter recovery, particularly since data suggest people want to holiday domestically but not in big cities.

Figures from AirDNA, which analyses accommodation bookings, shows that across the UK the number of beds booked for the most popular period of this summer is already above 90 per cent of where it stood at this time in 2019.

But bookings in London for June to September are 90 per cent lower than at the same point in 2019, reflecting both the loss of overseas tourists and Britons’ preference for non-urban destinations. Meanwhile, reservations in much of Devon and Cornwall are above pre-pandemic peaks.

“We’re seeing a global trend of people avoiding travel to cities,” said Jamie Lane, vice-president of research at AirDNA. “And as lockdowns ease in some markets, people are looking to the coast or the mountains instead.”

This is corroborated by data from Transparent, which analyses holiday bookings. It found that by mid-March 35 per cent of the UK’s available accommodation for July had already been booked, compared to 11 per cent for the same point in 2019.

With commuters and tourists absent, one of the keys to cities’ revival will be the prospects for dining and eating out, and the data here look promising. Figures from restaurant reservation website OpenTable show that during the first two weeks of March bookings were being made on average nine weeks ahead, extending more than a month beyond the reopening date for outdoor dining.

Amid rising anticipation of a British summer to remember, and a successful early phase of the UK’s vaccine rollout, the mood across the country is shifting from anxiety to cautious optimism.

When the pandemic hit, half of UK adults reported feeling high levels of anxiety according to an Office for National Statistics survey. In the midst of the virus’s winter wave, around 40 per cent of adults were still feeling the same way, but this has since fallen to closer to 30 per cent.

Meanwhile, both happiness and life satisfaction among Britons, which suffered increasingly over the six months to February this year, have rebounded strongly in recent weeks after the government laid out plans to ease the country out of lockdown.