Ashford Designer Outlet, Kent: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times
A designer outlet village under what its own fabric engineer calls the largest continuous tensile membrane roof in the world, sitting a few minutes walk from Ashford International station in Kent. Two things matter before you set off: the operator itself publishes three possible motorway junctions, and no Eurostar has stopped at Ashford International since March 2020. Here is the rest — the shops, the parking, the hours, and the one question about this place that nobody has answered.
Ashford Designer Outlet stands on Kimberley Way in Ashford, Kent, on the southern edge of the town next to an Asda, and it is one of the more architecturally interesting shopping destinations in Britain. It opened in 2000 to a design by the Richard Rogers Partnership, laid out as a horseshoe under a continuous fabric roof, and was extended in 2019 at a cost of £90m. It is operated by McArthurGlen and trades as a designer outlet, with somewhere close to a hundred brands under that roof.
The first thing to know is the trains, because a lot of what is written about this place online is now wrong. Ashford International station is a five-minute walk away and the outlet is roughly 38 minutes from London by rail. But no Eurostar service has called at Ashford International since March 2020, and as at 8 January 2026 Eurostar had no plans to resume. Any article that sells this outlet as a stop on a Eurostar day trip from Paris or Brussels is out of date, and if that was your plan, it needs rethinking before you book anything.
The second thing is the motorway junction, and the answer is genuinely plural. The operator's own plan-your-visit page tells drivers to leave at "M20 Junction 9, 10, or 10a". That is its wording, printed here verbatim. It is not vagueness on the operator's part and it is not us hedging — junction 10a is comparatively new, and all three will get you there. We have not narrowed it to one, because doing so would be inventing precision the operator declined to give.
The third thing is that we cannot tell you who owns it. McArthurGlen operates the centre; that is not in doubt. But after a sweep of Companies House and the trade press we could find no institution, no fund, no landlord and no percentage named anywhere for the asset itself. We have left the owner field on this page blank and explained why, rather than promoting the operator into a landlord as at least one published article has done.
What follows is drawn from McArthurGlen's own pages — which, unusually and helpfully, are server-rendered right down to the store directory — plus Companies House, Kent Online, Ashford Borough Council's own retail evidence base, Chapman Taylor, the Richard Rogers practice, the fabric engineer Architen Landrell, Visit Ashford and Tenterden, AshfordFOR, Parkopedia and bustimes.org. Where sources disagree we have printed both. Where nobody publishes something, we say so.
74% of those who work here are from Ashford and we have close to 2,000 people.
The essentials
| Detail | Ashford Designer Outlet |
|---|---|
| What it is | A covered designer outlet village on a horseshoe plan, under a continuous fabric roof, with around a hundred brands, roughly fourteen cafes and restaurants and a children's play area. Operated by McArthurGlen. Designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership and opened in 2000; the 2019 extension is by Chapman Taylor. Architen Landrell, the fabric engineer, calls the roof "the largest continuous tensile membrane structure in the world" — roughly 35,000 sq m of PVC-coated polyester running about a kilometre, with inverted cones that collect rainwater. It was the RIBA Journal's Building of the Month in April 2000. |
| Address | Kimberley Way, Ashford, Kent, TN24 0SD |
| Satnav postcode | TN24 0SD |
| Opened | 2000, extended in 2019 Chapman Taylor's news page dates the extension to "autumn 2019" and its own project page to "November 2019". Both are the same architect, and we have printed both because they are what is published. |
| Size | Three figures, none of them the operator's. Chapman Taylor gives 17,200 sq m plus a 9,300 sq m extension, so 26,500 sq m gross. Construction Index (5 January 2018) describes the same growth as 17,000 sq m to 26,500 sq m with a 9,500 sq m extension. The Richard Rogers practice gives the original 2000 building as 19,000 sq m (204,515 sq ft) on a 30,000 sq m site with 1,400 parking spaces. McArthurGlen publishes no size figure at all. |
| Number of stores | "Over 100" (operator) Around 99 brands are listed in the operator's own directory. AshfordFOR says 110 in its page text but 100 in that page's own metadata. Kent Online reported 111 units at 98% occupancy on 3 November 2025, the best in seven years. Chapman Taylor counts 126 units. These are counting different things — brands, units, let units — and we have not picked one. |
| Owner | Not known, and we are not going to guess. No institution, fund or percentage is named for this asset anywhere we could find, after a sweep of Companies House and the trade press. A Kent Online planning piece calls McArthurGlen the "site owner" through its agents Montagu Evans, but that is local-press planning copy of the kind that routinely conflates operator with landlord. For contrast, the equivalent McArthurGlen sites at Livingston (LaSalle Investment Management, £52m) and Cannock (a named £160m joint venture) are explicit in the record — so the silence here is a real absence, not a search failure. |
| Operator | McArthurGlen McArthurGlen UK Limited, Companies House 02810264, incorporated 19 April 1993, active, at Nations House, 3rd Floor, 103 Wigmore Street, London W1U 1QS. It was previously named BAA-McArthur/Glen UK Limited — the airport operator BAA was the original UK development partner, and the Rogers practice still names its client as "BAA McArthurGlen UK Ltd". The McArthurGlen business itself has been a Kaempfer Partners and Simon Property Group joint venture since 2013, but that is the operator's ownership, not this centre's. |
| Motorway junction | "M20 Junction 9, 10, or 10a" That is the operator's own wording on its plan-your-visit page, printed exactly as published. Three junctions, deliberately. The relevant A-roads are the A20, A2070 and A28. |
| Parking | Disputed. Around 1,400 spaces per Visit Ashford and Tenterden; 1,900 per AshfordFOR. Parkopedia, which is crowd-sourced, counts 863 for the Central car park alone, so it is plainly describing one car park rather than the site. The Rogers practice recorded 1,400 spaces at the 2000 opening, before the extension. |
| Parking tariff | £3 for 4 hours. Free for the first 30 minutes, and free after 5pm. This is an ANPR site, so your plate is read on the way in and out. Blue Badge holders park free but must register the plate at Guest Services — do not assume the badge on the dashboard is enough here. |
| Height restriction | None published by the operator Parkopedia gives 12ft 6in, about 3.81m, for the Central car park. That is crowd-sourced and it is not the landlord speaking, so treat it as a guide rather than a guarantee. |
| EV charging | 5 charge points, 10 chargers, in the southern car park near Asda The network is not named on any source we could read. |
| Coach parking | Exists, but no booking process is published anywhere Neither the operator nor the tourism board explains how a coach party arranges a visit. Phone before you plan one. |
| Website | mcarthurglen.com, on the Ashford path ashforddesigneroutlet.com is alive as a mail domain — Guest Services uses a guestservices@ address on it — but its web status is unresolved, because our fetch timed out before it could even read the robots file. Use the mcarthurglen.com path. |
| Phone | +44 1233 895 941 or +44 1233 895 940 (the outlet); 01233 895900 is the tourism board's number, not the centre's |
Opening times
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday to Friday | 10am – 8pm the operator gives this on two of its own pages, which agree. Visit Ashford and Tenterden says 10am – 9pm, undated. |
| Saturday | 9am – 9pm operator |
| Sunday | 10am – 6pm operator. Mountain Warehouse's own store page gives 10.30am – 5pm for its shop — almost certainly the six-hour Sunday trading cap biting the shop rather than the mall. |
| Bank holidays | 9am – 9pm Mountain Warehouse only. The operator publishes no bank holiday times. |
| Christmas market, Monday to Saturday | 9am – 9pm 1 November to 1 January |
| Christmas market, Sunday | 10am – 6pm |
Checked 5 September 2026, and for once the operator agrees with itself. Two separate McArthurGlen pages give the same times — Monday to Friday 10am to 8pm, Saturday 9am to 9pm, Sunday 10am to 6pm — which is rarer than it ought to be and is the reason we have led with them.
Two other sources differ and we have printed both rather than tidying them away. Visit Ashford and Tenterden gives Monday to Friday as 10am to 9pm, an hour later, with no date on the page to tell us how old it is. Mountain Warehouse's own store page for its branch here matches the operator Monday to Saturday but gives Sunday as 10.30am to 5pm and bank holidays as 9am to 9pm. The Sunday difference is almost certainly the six-hour Sunday trading limit applying to the shop rather than to the mall, which is a normal and harmless mismatch at outlet centres — the doors open before the tills do.
The operator publishes nothing for bank holidays, so the only holiday times on this page belong to one tenant. Individual restaurants keep their own hours. If you are travelling for a specific shop, or coming on a bank holiday, ring +44 1233 895 941 first.
Getting there
By road
The operator publishes three junctions at once, and its exact wording is "M20 Junction 9, 10, or 10a". We have printed that verbatim and deliberately not narrowed it. Junction 10a is comparatively recent, and the honest position is that the operator considers all three usable — so pick whichever suits the direction you are coming from and follow the local signs. The A-roads in play are the A20, A2070 and A28. The postcode is TN24 0SD.
Parking
Parking is £3 for four hours, free for the first 30 minutes, and free after 5pm. It is an ANPR site: cameras read your number plate on the way in and on the way out, so there is no ticket and nothing on the windscreen to remind you.
Blue Badge holders park free, but only if the plate is registered at Guest Services. That is the detail worth carrying with you — displaying the badge alone will not do it, and the letter arrives weeks later.
How many spaces there are depends who you ask. Visit Ashford and Tenterden says around 1,400; AshfordFOR says 1,900. Parkopedia counts 863 for the Central car park on its own, which suggests it is describing one structure rather than the whole site. The Richard Rogers practice recorded 1,400 at the 2000 opening, before the extension was built, so the higher figure is not implausible — but nobody has published a current total we can stand behind. No height restriction is published by the operator; Parkopedia gives 12ft 6in (about 3.81m) for the Central car park, crowd-sourced.
EV charging is in the southern car park near Asda: five charge points with ten chargers. No source names the network or the tariff.
By train — read this before you book
Ashford International is a five-minute walk according to Visit Ashford and Tenterden, and the operator puts the centre roughly 38 minutes from London by rail. Domestic services make this one of the easiest outlet centres in the country to reach without a car.
But no Eurostar has called at Ashford International since March 2020, and as at 8 January 2026 Eurostar had no plans to resume, as reported by Kent Online. The "International" in the station name is currently aspirational. Councillor Noel Ovenden, Leader of Ashford Borough Council, put it this way at a meeting reported in that coverage: "We have all of the pieces of the puzzle here in this room that can put Ashford back on the international rail map." Virgin Trains has pledged cross-Channel services by 2030, subject to £4m of funding. Until something changes, if you are coming from France or Belgium you cannot get off here, and any guide that suggests otherwise was written before 2020.
By bus
The stop is published on bustimes.org as "South Ashford Designer Outlet and Asda (Stop A)", reference 2400A070270A, and twelve Stagecoach South East services call there: 1, 2, 2A, 113, 501, 501C, 501E, 502, 511, 511A, 511B and 970. No frequencies are published for any of them, so check a timetable rather than turning up.
Coaches
Coach parking exists. No booking process is published anywhere — not by the operator, not by the tourism board. If you are bringing a group, phone the centre on +44 1233 895 941 and ask, because there is nothing in writing to follow.
Accessibility
What the operator does publish is decent: Blue Badge bays, free wheelchair and mobility scooter hire from Guest Services on production of ID, and a Changing Places toilet with a height-adjustable bench and a hoist. A Changing Places facility is worth travelling for and relatively few outlet centres have one.
There is no AccessAble guide to this centre. AccessAble has surveyed only the Marks & Spencer store inside it, so there is no independent, measured survey of the malls, the toilets, the car parks or the routes between them. If you need bay dimensions, door widths or gradients, they are not on the record here.
The shops
The directory here is unusually solid. Unlike most outlet operators, McArthurGlen serves its site — including the full store list — as plain server-rendered HTML, so the roughly 99 brands listed are a real directory rather than a marketing claim. The operator's own summary is "over 100".
The counts still disagree, and they are counting different things. AshfordFOR says 110 in its page text and 100 in that same page's metadata. Kent Online reported 111 units at 98% occupancy on 3 November 2025, which the centre described as its best in seven years. Chapman Taylor, the extension architect, counts 126 units. Brands, units and let units are three different numbers, and we have printed all of them.
The names
Among the roughly 99: Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Levi's, Coach, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, The North Face, Clarks and Marks & Spencer Outlet. There are around fourteen cafes and restaurants on site.
What has arrived
- The Label Yard — 28 May 2026, its first Kent store and sixth in the UK, taking the former Jack Wolfskin unit.
- The Gift Company — 29 May 2026, in the former Belstaff unit.
- Cornish Bakery, PLAYMOBIL, Pepe Jeans, Joseph, Cadbury and Rodd & Gunn — all reported as incoming in November 2025. The PLAYMOBIL store was reported as the brand's first UK standalone.
- Calendar Club — a Christmas pop-up, also November 2025.
What has gone
Kent Online ran a detailed departures piece on 24 February 2026, and it is the source for most of this: Calendar Club left in January 2026 (it is a seasonal unit), Belstaff closed on 15 February 2026, Jack Wolfskin on 18 April 2026, Puma Clearance at an unstated date, and Russell & Bromley was said to be going "in coming weeks". Lacoste was temporarily shut for a refit until March.
Radley is the one to check before you travel. Its administrators were appointed on 26 May 2026, and the Ashford shop — the brand's only store in Kent, and here for around twenty years — was reported as closing by September 2026, along with all 21 UK stores. Gordon Brothers bought the brand, not the store estate, so the name surviving does not mean the shop does.
Two of those departures have already been backfilled, which tells you something about how the centre is trading: The Label Yard took the Jack Wolfskin unit in May 2026 and The Gift Company took Belstaff's.
Useful to know
For families
There is a "Kiddy Cars" play area with a seven-metre treehouse, which is a genuine destination in its own right rather than a corner with a slide in it.
Bags, wi-fi and loyalty
There are no lockers, but Guest Services runs a free "Drop & Shop" bag store — you leave your bags with them, on production of ID, and carry on shopping. Free wi-fi is provided across the centre, and McArthurGlen runs a Loyalty Club app which we have not tested.
Dogs
Dogs are welcome in most areas. The operator does not publish a list of which shops admit them.
Tax-free shopping
No tax-free or VIP tourist shopping scheme is published for this centre. That is genuinely surprising for a designer outlet sitting five minutes from a station with "International" in its name, and worth saying out loud — several McArthurGlen centres elsewhere do promote such schemes. If it matters to your visit, ask Guest Services rather than assuming.
The Christmas market
Ashford Borough Council approved an expansion of the outlet's Christmas market from 9 stalls to 21 in August 2025, running 1 November to 1 January, 9am to 9pm Monday to Saturday and 10am to 6pm on Sunday, with a five-year consent running to 2029. It is the only live planning matter at the site — there is no floorspace scheme in the pipeline that we could find.
Not this place
Ashford has a lot of retail and the names blur. This page is about the designer outlet on Kimberley Way. It is not Ashford town centre or County Square, not Eureka Leisure Park or Eureka Park, not Ashford Retail Park, not Warren Retail Park and not Elwick Place. The specific trap worth flagging: the Marks & Spencer Outlet inside this centre is a different shop from the Marks & Spencer Foodhall at Warren Retail Park, and a phone map will happily send you to the wrong one.
It is not a Frasers site
We checked, because the question comes up with outlet centres. Frasers Plus lists Braehead, East Midlands, Leeds, Luton and Swindon among its destinations — Ashford is not on that list, and no report we found links Frasers to this centre.
How it got here
Ashford Designer Outlet opened in 2000, and the building is the reason to care. It was designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership as a horseshoe under a continuous fabric roof: roughly 35,000 sq m of PVC-coated polyester running about a kilometre, which the fabric engineer Architen Landrell describes as "the largest continuous tensile membrane structure in the world", with inverted cones that collect rainwater. The Rogers practice records the original building as 19,000 sq m (204,515 sq ft) on a 30,000 sq m site with 1,400 parking spaces. The RIBA Journal made it its Building of the Month in April 2000.
The origin story is in the company name. McArthurGlen UK Limited (Companies House 02810264) was incorporated on 19 April 1993 and was previously called BAA-McArthur/Glen UK Limited — the airport operator BAA was the original UK development partner for the outlet business, and the Rogers practice's own project page still names its client as "BAA McArthurGlen UK Ltd". That is a good piece of history and a poor answer to the ownership question, because it describes a developer three decades ago rather than a landlord today.
Ashford Borough Council's evidence base shows what the outlet did to the local retail map. Its 2015 Retail and Leisure Needs Assessment, prepared for the local plan, records the outlet's share of the area's clothing and footwear spend nearly doubling from 8.8% in 2003 to 16.8% in 2014 — and the same document was already modelling an extension of around 6,665 sq m.
The extension that got built was bigger than that and cost £90m. McLaren Construction was announced as contractor on 5 January 2018, with Chapman Taylor as architect. Chapman Taylor's news page says it opened in "autumn 2019" and its own project page says "November 2019"; both are that architect's own publications and we have not picked between them. The scheme took the centre from 17,200 sq m to 26,500 sq m gross, adding 9,300 sq m — or, in the Construction Index's telling on 5 January 2018, from 17,000 to 26,500 with a 9,500 sq m extension. It also added a living wall, billed as one of Europe's largest, and a food piazza.
The centre's recent trading has been strong on the operator's own account. On 3 November 2025 Kent Online reported 111 units at 98% occupancy, the best in seven years, with centre manager Peter Heritage noting that 74% of the people who work there are from Ashford and that the centre supports close to 2,000 people. Peter Corr held the centre manager's job in 2018 — a change of personnel over seven years, not a contradiction in the record.
What the record does not contain is an owner. We looked at Companies House and swept the trade press, and no institution, fund or percentage is named for this asset. The comparison that makes the absence meaningful is with McArthurGlen's other British centres: Livingston is publicly held by LaSalle Investment Management at £52m, and Cannock sits in a named £160m joint venture. Those are explicit in the public record. Ashford is not, and one Kent Online planning piece describing McArthurGlen as the "site owner" via its agents Montagu Evans is local-press planning copy of a kind that routinely blurs operator and landlord. McArthurGlen operates this centre. Who owns it is a question we have left open, because the answer is not published.
What we could not check
- Nobody publishes who owns this centre, so the owner field on this page is blank. After a sweep of Companies House and the trade press we found no institution, no fund, no landlord and no percentage named for the asset. Livingston (LaSalle Investment Management, £52m) and Cannock (a named £160m joint venture) are explicit in the record, which is why we treat the silence at Ashford as a genuine absence rather than something we failed to find.
- McArthurGlen is the operator, not the landlord. A Kent Online planning piece calls McArthurGlen the "site owner" through its agents Montagu Evans, but that is local-press planning copy of the sort that routinely conflates the two. Separately, the McArthurGlen business has been a Kaempfer Partners and Simon Property Group joint venture since 2013 — that is who owns the operating company, and it says nothing about who owns Ashford.
- No Eurostar has called at Ashford International since March 2020, and as at 8 January 2026 Eurostar had no plans to resume (Kent Online). Virgin Trains has pledged cross-Channel services by 2030 subject to £4m of funding, which is a pledge and not a timetable. Do not plan a visit around getting off a train from Paris or Brussels here, and treat any older article that suggests you can as out of date.
- The operator publishes three motorway junctions, not one: "M20 Junction 9, 10, or 10a". We have printed that wording exactly as it appears on its plan-your-visit page. If you see a single junction quoted elsewhere, somebody has picked one on your behalf without the operator's say-so.
- The store count depends entirely on who is counting and what. The operator says "over 100" and lists around 99 brands; AshfordFOR says 110 in its text and 100 in its own metadata; Kent Online reported 111 units at 98% occupancy on 3 November 2025; Chapman Taylor counts 126 units. Brands, units and let units are three different measures and we have not reconciled them.
- There is no operator size figure at all. The three published numbers are Chapman Taylor's 17,200 sq m plus 9,300 sq m extension for 26,500 sq m gross, the Construction Index's 17,000 to 26,500 with a 9,500 sq m extension, and the Richard Rogers practice's 19,000 sq m (204,515 sq ft) for the original 2000 building. They are measuring at different dates and on different bases.
- The parking space count is disputed: around 1,400 per Visit Ashford and Tenterden, 1,900 per AshfordFOR. Parkopedia's 863 is for the Central car park alone and is crowd-sourced. The Rogers practice recorded 1,400 spaces at the 2000 opening, before the extension.
- No height restriction is published by the operator. The 12ft 6in (about 3.81m) figure for the Central car park comes from Parkopedia and is crowd-sourced, so treat it as a guide rather than a guarantee if you are driving a van or a motorhome.
- Blue Badge parking is free but you must register your number plate at Guest Services. This is an ANPR site and the badge on the dashboard will not be seen by a camera.
- Two sources disagree with the operator on opening hours and we have printed all of them. The operator says 10am to 8pm Monday to Friday on two of its own pages; Visit Ashford and Tenterden says 10am to 9pm, undated. Mountain Warehouse's own store page gives Sunday as 10.30am to 5pm and bank holidays as 9am to 9pm, which is almost certainly the six-hour Sunday trading cap applying to that shop rather than to the mall. The operator publishes no bank holiday hours at all.
- Coach parking exists but no booking process is published anywhere — not by the operator, not by the tourism board. Groups will need to phone +44 1233 895 941 and ask, because there is nothing in writing to follow.
- AccessAble has no guide to this centre, only to the Marks and Spencer store inside it. So there is no independent surveyed information on bay dimensions, door widths, gradients or routes through the malls. The Changing Places toilet, the free wheelchair and scooter hire from Guest Services and the Blue Badge bays are the operator's own claims.
- No tax-free or VIP tourist shopping scheme is published for Ashford, which is unexpected at a designer outlet minutes from an international station. We have not concluded there is none — only that nobody publishes it. Ask Guest Services before relying on it.
- The web status of ashforddesigneroutlet.com is unresolved. The domain is alive as a mail domain — Guest Services uses a guestservices@ address on it — but our fetch timed out before it could even reach the robots file, so we cannot tell you whether it serves a site, redirects, or is parked. Use the mcarthurglen.com path.
- Radley may already be gone by the time you visit. Administrators were appointed on 26 May 2026 and the Ashford shop — the brand's only Kent store, here around twenty years — was reported as closing by September 2026 along with all 21 UK stores. Gordon Brothers bought the brand and not the store estate, so the label surviving does not mean the shop has. Lacoste was also shut for a refit to March, and Russell and Bromley was reported as leaving "in coming weeks" in February 2026 without a closing date ever being given.
- No frequencies are published for any of the twelve Stagecoach South East services calling at the "South Ashford Designer Outlet and Asda (Stop A)" stop. Check a timetable rather than turning up and waiting.
- Ashford has several retail schemes and they are easily confused. This is not County Square or the town centre, not Eureka Leisure Park or Eureka Park, not Ashford Retail Park, not Warren Retail Park and not Elwick Place. In particular, the Marks and Spencer Outlet inside this centre is a different shop from the Marks and Spencer Foodhall at Warren Retail Park.
- The quotation on this page comes from Kent Online's report of 3 November 2025. We hold the wording and the attribution but not a direct link to the article, so no source URL is given beneath it.