The co-owner of Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield saw underlying profit reduce from £306m last year to £201m for the year ended March 31, 2021.

Simon Carter, CEO of British Land, said: “This has been an extraordinary year so I am enormously proud of the resilient performance the team delivered, and the strong progress we have made across the priority areas I set out in November.

“Our new strategy exploits our competitive strengths in development, active management and repositioning assets and sees us invest behind two key themes, campuses and retail and fulfilment.

“In Retail, we are expanding our approach to include fulfilment, building on our market leading position in high quality, out of town retail parks which already play a key role in retailers’ fulfilment models, and complementing this with development led investment in urban logistics, primarily in London.

“We see a value opportunity in retail parks, reflecting increased yields and a more stable occupational outlook. We have been further encouraged by how strongly footfall and sales have rebounded in recent weeks.”

He added: “While Covid-19 has clearly impacted our performance, with the portfolio value down 10.8 per cent, we have a strong balance sheet and have already delivered excellent progress against our four priorities.

“We’ve sold £1.2bn of assets, overall 6.2 per cent ahead of book value, completed our first net zero development at 100 Liverpool Street and committed to develop Norton Folgate and 1 Broadgate, where we have pre let nearly 30 per cent of the office space to JLL.

“We have made our first logistics acquisition in North London and acquired £197m of high quality retail parks. Operationally, we have driven rent collection and leasing activity, which at 1.7m sq ft in Retail was our highest ever. I would like to thank the whole team for their incredible efforts this year.

“Looking forward, we will further align our business to growth and value, benefitting from the pick up in economic activity that is now emerging.”