Aintree Shopping Park, Liverpool: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 300,000 sq ft retail park on Ormskirk Road opposite the Grand National course, owned by The Crown Estate, with B&Q, Marks and Spencer and a very large Next, and 1,100 free parking spaces. Before you set off: there are two separate retail parks here, both have been called “Racecourse Retail Park”, and they are owned by different people. This page is about the northern one, the Crown Estate scheme at L9 5AN. Here is what the operator publishes, where its figures disagree with everyone else’s, and the long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 13 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Aintree Shopping Park sits on Ormskirk Road — the A59 — about six and a half miles north of Liverpool city centre, across the road from the racecourse that stages the Grand National. It is a straightforward open-air retail park of the big-box kind: a long terrace and a couple of standalone units, 1,100 free parking spaces, a B&Q that takes up more than a third of the floorspace, a Marks and Spencer with a Foodhall, and a Next large enough to hold a Costa and half a dozen concessions inside it.

Start with the name, because Aintree is the worst case of name confusion we have researched. Two separately owned schemes sit on this stretch of Ormskirk Road. This one — the northern one, L9 5AN, with B&Q, M&S and Next — is Aintree Shopping Park, owned by The Crown Estate. The southern one is Aintree Racecourse Retail Park, owned by Orbit Developments, with TK Maxx, JD, Currys and The Range. And both have been called “Racecourse Retail Park” in print, in different decades and by different people. Almost every figure you will find online has been attached to the wrong one at some point.

The operator’s website is a redirect. aintreeshoppingpark.co.uk resolves, and it is genuinely this park, but every path on it returns a 302 to a single page inside The Crown Estate’s portfolio site at retailparks.thecrownestate.co.uk. There is no separate store directory, opening-hours or getting-here page — we tried all three and got 404s. Everything the landlord publishes about Aintree fits on one screen, which is why a good deal of what follows had to come from tenants’ own store pages instead.

What follows draws on The Crown Estate’s own page, letting-agent particulars from Savills and Park Place Retail, trade reports of the 2009 and 2010 sales, a March 2025 planning statement lodged with Sefton Council, Sefton’s adopted Local Plan, two Historic England list entries and the store pages of Next and B&Q. Where sources disagree we print both and say who published each. Where nobody publishes something — and at Aintree that includes the opening date, the toilets and any park telephone number — we say so.

Racecourse Retail Park and Aintree Shopping Park to its north are established retail destinations serving the north Liverpool area.

The essentials

Opening times

There is only one operator page, so the usual cross-check was impossible. On most parks we read three or four of the landlord’s own pages and compare them, because operators routinely contradict themselves. Here there is a single page, so everything else below comes from tenants or a third-party directory.

We do not believe the park-level hours are shop hours, and we are printing them anyway. Two things give it away. First, The Crown Estate gives the Click & Collect window as 7am to 11pm — exactly the weekday figure. Second, English Sunday trading law caps large shops at six consecutive hours, so a Sunday running from 9am to 11pm is not a trading day for B&Q or Marks and Spencer or anyone else of that size. Our reading is that these are the hours the site and its car park are accessible. The Crown Estate does not say that, so we have printed its figures as published and told you what we think they mean rather than quietly correcting them.

ukmalls.co.uk disagrees on Saturday, giving 7am to 11pm where the landlord gives 9am to 8pm. We are not resolving that either. The ukmalls listing is visibly years out of date in other respects — it still lists Mothercare, Harveys and Paperchase — so we would weight the landlord’s page above it, but we have printed both.

The rows you can actually plan a trip around are the tenant rows — B&Q from 7am Monday to Saturday, Next until 9pm on weekdays, both straight from those retailers’ own store pages on 13 September 2026. Note B&Q’s short Sunday, 10am to 4pm. Marks and Spencer’s store page is JavaScript-rendered and gave us nothing, and Boots refused our request, so two of the four anchors have no times here at all. Check their apps before you travel.

Getting there

By road — and this time the junction is published

We normally refuse to print a motorway junction unless the operator publishes one, because a wrong junction is worse than none. The Crown Estate publishes one here, in its own words: leave at M57 Junction 7 or M58 Junction 0 and follow the signs for Aintree Racecourse and the A59. “M58 Junction 0” is not a typo — the M58 really does have a junction numbered zero, at its eastern end where it meets the A59 at Aintree. If your satnav rejects it, use the postcode.

Savills’ own particulars put the park 6.5 miles north of Liverpool city centre on the A59 Ormskirk Road, which they describe as “the main arterial route linking the M57 and M58 interchange and the city centre”, with motorway access about half a mile north. In practice you are on the A59 either way, and the racecourse is your landmark.

Use L9 5AN — but be aware that the retail park next door is given as L9 5AN in some listings and L9 5AL in others, so the postcode alone will not separate them. Aim for B&Q, which is the largest building on the site and impossible to miss from the A59.

Parking

1,100 free spaces, surface level, and the landlord’s wording is “free all-day parking”. Three separate sources — Completely Retail, the Savills site plan and AccessAble — all give 1,100, which is as much agreement as you ever get on a space count. The 2009 sale documents said “over 1,000”, so the number has been broadly stable for fifteen years.

No time limit is published and no enforcement company is named, and we would not read much into that: plenty of free retail park car parks are ANPR-monitored without saying so on the landlord’s website. No height restriction is published either. It is an open surface car park, so a barrier is unlikely, but if you are driving something tall you are judging it on arrival. There are “10+ car parking spaces for Blue Badge Holders” — the landlord’s own phrasing, vaguer than it needs to be. No coach parking and no taxi rank are published by anyone.

By train

The Crown Estate names one station: Old Roan, on Merseyrail, and describes it as a 10-minute walk. That is the operator’s own figure and nobody else publishes a walking time to check it against.

Aintree station is closer to the racecourse and on the same Merseyrail Ormskirk line, and it is the station everybody uses for the Grand National — but the landlord does not name it and no source gives a walking time from it to the shops, so we have not invented one. Old Roan is the route the landlord itself recommends.

By bus

The stop is called “Aintree Retail Park” — the legacy name again — and The Crown Estate puts it within 150 metres, served by routes 300, 310 and 345. No operator is named and no frequencies are published.

By bike

The most specific thing on the landlord’s whole page, and credit where it is due: the park sits on National Cycle Route 62, with cycle racks between Halfords and EE and outside B&Q. Most retail parks will not tell you that much.

Accessibility

The park has been audited by AccessAble, with detailed access guides and routes published at accessable.co.uk — an independent audit beats a landlord’s own assurance every time. The AccessAble landing page confirms the audit, the 1,100 free spaces and the bus links; the per-facility detail sits behind an in-page search we could not extract, so we have printed no specifics from it. For door widths, dropped kerbs or accessible toilets, go to that guide directly.

The site is flat, single-level and open-air, with parking in front of the units — the easiest arrangement there is for anyone who finds an enclosed mall hard work. Not published anywhere: toilets, baby changing, a Changing Places toilet, wheelchair or scooter hire, or Shopmobility. That does not mean there are none, only that the landlord does not say. What The Crown Estate does publish, and almost no operator bothers to, is the exact location of the defibrillator: between B&Q and Pets at Home.

The shops

The Crown Estate’s directory listed 20 stores when we counted it on 13 September 2026: B&Q, Blossom House of Flowers, Boots, Costa, DFS, EE, Furniture Village, Greggs, Halfords, Hobbycraft, LIVHOME, Marks and Spencer, M&S Foodhall, McDonald’s, Nando’s, Next, Pets at Home, poltronesofà at ScS, Tim Hortons and TUI.

The anchors

B&Q is the giant, at 103,512 sq ft — more than a third of the entire park in one building, with a kitchen showroom, bathroom displays, a paint mixing service and a Timpson key-cutting concession. It opens at 7am Monday to Saturday, which is the earliest anything here trades.

Next is 40,857 sq ft, a full-line store: menswear, womenswear, petite, childrenswear and home, plus a Lingerie Room, Home Design Service, schoolwear, Click & Collect, a Costa Ground café inside it and concessions for Ted Baker Kids, Victoria’s Secret and Laura Ashley. Several of those are shops inside a shop, which is part of why the store counts here never agree.

Marks and Spencer is listed at 30,073 sq ft with a separate 16,220 sq ft M&S Food alongside it.

The one dated arrival — and the puzzle attached to it

The only opening date we could source for any store here is the Marks and Spencer, which opened in February 2009 at 39,000 sq ft, recorded in the coverage of that June’s sale. Today’s particulars give M&S as 30,073 sq ft plus a 16,220 sq ft Foodhall — 46,293 sq ft between them, seven thousand more than the store that opened in 2009, split across two listings. It has clearly been reconfigured or extended since, and nobody documents when or how.

What has gone — and why none of it has a date

Nobody publishes closures at this park — no landlord statement, no agent note, no local-press round-up we could reach. So we compared a stale directory against today’s list. ukmalls.co.uk’s listing, read on 13 September 2026 but visibly years old, names Mothercare, Clarks (in Mothercare), Harveys, Paperchase (in Next), Frankie & Benny’s and Topps Tiles, and none is on the landlord’s directory today. Further back, the 2009 and 2010 transaction reports name Homebase and Best Buy, neither of which is here now.

There are no dates on any of that and we are not going to imply there are. Several of those chains collapsed nationally — Mothercare’s UK retail arm and Harveys both in 2020, Paperchase in 2023, Best Buy’s entire UK chain in 2011 — so their absence from Aintree is not necessarily a story about Aintree. All the comparison proves is that those names were listed here once and are not listed here now.

What has arrived, undated

Hobbycraft, Tim Hortons, LIVHOME, poltronesofà at ScS, Greggs, Blossom House of Flowers and TUI are all on the current directory and on none of the older lists we found, and no opening date could be sourced for a single one of them. For a park owned by an institution the size of The Crown Estate, that is a surprisingly thin public record.

Food

Nando’s, McDonald’s, Greggs, Tim Hortons and a Costa — the Costa on the directory trades inside Next as a Costa Ground. That is the whole food offer, and there is no cinema, no gym and no leisure operator on this park.

Useful to know

Which retail park do you actually want?

The single most useful thing on this page, stated plainly. For B&Q, Marks and Spencer, Next, Boots, Pets at Home, Halfords, DFS, Furniture Village, Hobbycraft, Nando’s or McDonald’s, you want this park — Aintree Shopping Park, L9 5AN, the northern one. For TK Maxx, JD, Currys, HomeSense, The Range, Bensons for Beds, O2 or the Costa drive-thru, you want the other one, Aintree Racecourse Retail Park, immediately south, owned by Orbit Developments. They are within walking distance of each other, which is the saving grace, but they are separate car parks, separate landlords and separate sets of shops.

Getting in early, and the Sunday trap

B&Q opens at 7am Monday to Saturday, by some distance the earliest thing trading here, and that is the window if you want the car park to yourself. Sunday is the opposite: B&Q trades only 10am to 4pm and Next only 11am to 5pm, so a Sunday afternoon arrival can easily go wrong. Ignore the landlord’s 9am–11pm Sunday figure for this purpose.

The Grand National changes everything

The park is directly across the A59 from Aintree Racecourse. Grand National week is the busiest few days in this postcode by a very long way, with road closures, rail crowding and heavy demand on every car park within a mile. Neither The Crown Estate nor the racecourse publishes anything about how the shopping park operates during the meeting — whether parking is restricted, whether free all-day parking still applies, or whether A59 access changes. We could find no published guidance at all, so ring the individual shops before a National-week shopping trip.

Things nobody publishes

No park telephone number, no named manager, and nothing on toilets, baby changing, a Changing Places toilet, cash machines, lost property, a gift card, a quiet hour, a dogs policy, a height limit or a parking time limit. Absent from the website is not the same as absent from the park — but The Crown Estate’s entire published statement about Aintree fits on one page, and this is what is missing from it.

Elsewhere in the region

If Aintree does not have what you need, the obvious alternatives across Merseyside are Liverpool Shopping Park at Edge Lane, New Mersey Shopping Park at Speke, Liverpool ONE in the city centre, and Cheshire Oaks across the Mersey for outlet shopping.

How it got here

Nobody publishes when it opened

We could not find an opening date for Aintree Shopping Park anywhere — not from The Crown Estate, Savills, Park Place Retail, Sefton Council or the trade press. The earliest hard date we can attach to the place is 10 June 2009, and by then it was already a mature, fully let, 291,471 sq ft retail park with a weighted average unexpired lease term of about thirteen years. It had plainly been trading for years before that.

Do not believe the 1995 date you may see online. A March 2025 planning statement lodged with Sefton Council records that the original retail warehouse consent for the park next door — the Orbit scheme, application 94/0685/S — was approved in 1995, with subdivisions and variations through to 2010. That belongs to the other park, and it is exactly the sort of figure that migrates between the two schemes online.

The ownership chain, which is unusually well documented

Land Securities owned it, through a subsidiary, until 10 June 2009, when it sold the park — then named Racecourse Retail Park — to London & Stamford Property, the Guernsey-based quoted investor, for £61m, in what was London & Stamford\'s first purchase in the North West. The scheme was then 291,471 sq ft across 13 units, producing £5,481,579 a year at rents of £13 to £30 per sq ft, with over 1,000 parking spaces and Next, Homebase, B&Q, Mothercare, Boots and the four-month-old Marks and Spencer as tenants. Savills acted for London & Stamford and Cushman & Wakefield for Land Securities.

Sixteen months later, on 6 October 2010, The Crown Estate bought it for £101.5m. That reporting gave the park as 295,000 sq ft with M&S, Boots, Next, Best Buy, B&Q and Halfords, put London & Stamford\'s purchase price at £60.9m rather than £61m, and calculated a 66% profit for the seller in a year and a third — a journalist\'s arithmetic, not a party\'s disclosure. The Crown Estate bought Victoria Retail Park for £57m around the same time.

No sale since 2010 has been reported anywhere we could find, and The Crown Estate\'s own live site carried the park on 13 September 2026. That is the strongest evidence available that it still owns it. We are not stating a percentage of the freehold, because nobody publishes one. One curiosity: the Crown Estate\'s corporate regional retail page describes 14 destinations, around 5 million sq ft and about 100 million visits a year and names Fosse Park, Rushden Lakes, The Gate and its Westgate joint venture — but not Aintree. Absence from a marketing page is not evidence of a sale, and we have not treated it as one.

Sefton\'s Local Plan does not mention either retail park

This is a genuinely odd gap. A Local Plan for Sefton, adopted in April 2017, does not mention Aintree Shopping Park or Aintree Racecourse Retail Park at all. Aintree appears only as a suburban residential area and the racecourse as “the home of the Grand National”. There is no retail park designation, no floorspace figure and no health check for something approaching 450,000 sq ft of retail warehousing across the two schemes inside the borough\'s own boundary. Sefton\'s 2021 Retail Strategy Review might say more, but that document refused our request.

The racecourse across the road, and what Historic England does list

Historic England holds no listing for either retail park, which is what you would expect of late twentieth-century retail sheds. It does list the building opposite. The County Stand at Aintree Racecourse is Grade II listed, list entry 1343257, designated on 11 October 1968. The entry is a pre-1968-style description rather than the modern “Reasons for Designation” format, and it opens: “Grandstand. Date stone to pilaster strip reads: ‘WRG/ June 12th 1885’. Brick, yellow to east facade, red to west facade, and stone dressings.” It describes two storeys and a roof terrace across 41 bays, a first-floor terrace with “columns with capitals based on those of the Tower of the Winds”, and a west facade with three crow-stepped gables — and it records the building\'s “historical associations with the Grand National which started as the Grand Liverpool Steeplechase in 1839”. The stand you can see from the B&Q car park has stood since 1885 and been listed since 1968.

One warning for anyone searching the List themselves. Historic England entry 1436382 is called “The Grand National”, is Grade II listed and was designated on 19 April 2017 — and it is a wooden rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, opened in 1935, by Charles Paige and Harry G Traver with an Art Deco station by Joseph Emberton. It has nothing whatever to do with Aintree, and it is the first thing you hit if you search the List for “Grand National”.

How the two parks came to share three names

The northern scheme — this one — was called Racecourse Retail Park at least until 2010, and its tenants still use that name: Next\'s store locator gives “Unit 2, Racecourse Retail Park, Aintree, L9 5AN” and B&Q\'s gives “Racecourse Retail Park, 1 Ormskirk Road”. Boots calls its branch “Liverpool Aintree Retail Park” and the bus stop outside is “Aintree Retail Park”, while the southern scheme is addressed “Racecourse Retail Park, Aintree L9 5AL” in its own planning documents. One park, four names, next to another park whose name contains two of them.