Bloomfield Shopping Centre & Retail Park, Bangor: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A covered mall and an adjoining retail park on the southern edge of Bangor, County Down, anchored by Marks and Spencer and Tesco on leases that run to the twenty-second century. Before you search: this is Bangor in Northern Ireland, not Bangor in Wales, and the operator has renamed the place Lesley Bloomfield without changing its own page titles. The site you want is lesleybloomfield.com. Here is what it publishes, where it contradicts itself, and what nobody publishes.

Last checked 9 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Bloomfield sits on South Circular Road on the southern edge of Bangor, County Down, and it is the reason a great many people in North Down never go into Bangor town centre at all. It opened in 1992, was refurbished in 2001 and extended in 2002, and it has two halves: an enclosed mall anchored by Marks and Spencer and a Tesco superstore, and a run of retail warehouse units alongside it. One car park, one directory.

Start with the name, because it changed and the operator has not finished changing it. The centre was bought in April 2024 by the Herbert Group and renamed Lesley Bloomfield, after Lesley Herbert — the same thing the Herberts did at what is now the Lesley Forestside Centre in south Belfast. The website lives at lesleybloomfield.com and the contact page uses the new name; the page titles on that same website still say "Bloomfield Shopping Centre". Both names are current and neither is wrong.

And it is the Northern Irish Bangor. There is a Bangor in Gwynedd with its own retail park, and a Bangor in Maine with a mall. Neither has anything to do with this. The postcode you want is BT19 7HB. The good news is that lesleybloomfield.com is properly server-rendered — its opening hours, parking, services and store directory pages all load as text, and the directory returns every one of its 70 names — so most of what follows is the operator speaking. The bad news is what the site does not have: there is no getting-here page at all, no general centre opening time, no floor area, and no holiday hours.

What follows draws on the operator's own pages, the 2023 and 2024 sale coverage, two Ards and North Down Borough Council planning documents, a 2014 trade report on the receivership, and the store pages of Next and Tesco. Where sources disagree we print both figures and say who published each — and here the store count differs four ways and the floor area three.

Bloomfield District Centre comprises an enclosed shopping mall anchored by Marks and Spencer and a Tesco supermarket. These are complemented by 22 multiple retailers including, Next, H&M, and River Island.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on the operator's own opening-hours page on 9 September 2026. That page is a 65-row per-store table and it is the only source of hours the centre publishes. There is no general mall opening time anywhere on the website, so the rows above marked "most mall shops" are our reading of the dominant pattern in that table, not a figure the operator states.

For once, the operator and its tenants agree. Next's own store page publishes 9am to 9pm weekdays, 9am to 6.30pm Saturday and 1pm to 6pm Sunday — identical to the operator. Tesco's publishes 8am to 10pm weekdays, 8am to 9pm Saturday and 1pm to 6pm Sunday — also identical. That is not the usual result and it is worth saying so. B&M's own store page carries no hours at all, so its 8am to 11pm row rests on the operator alone.

The Sunday row is a Northern Ireland row. Large shops here trade five consecutive hours between 1pm and 6pm, which is why almost everything in the table opens at one o'clock. Next's own listing spells out the other half of that regime: "Enjoy browsing only for the first 30 mins (Sun / Bank Holidays)". The operator explains none of this — the pattern in its table is the only evidence of it.

The real gap is holidays. Nobody — not the operator, not a single tenant — publishes bank holiday, Christmas or New Year hours, and that includes the two Northern Ireland public holidays on 17 March and 12 July. If you are travelling on one of those days, ring 028 9127 0797 first.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode BT19 7HB, and that is genuinely all we can give you. The operator publishes no directions of any kind. Its navigation has no getting-here page, and no junction number, road number or driving instruction appears anywhere on the site. We are not going to invent a junction for a scheme whose operator publishes none, so none appears on this page. The address is South Circular Road, on the southern edge of Bangor.

Parking

1,466 spaces, free for up to four hours, of which 45 are parent and toddler bays and 68 disabled bays. Since 1 February 2025 there has been a charge beyond four hours: £2.20 for four to six hours, with six hours the maximum stay. The car park is run by Smart Parking, and overstaying or underpaying brings a £100 charge notice, reduced to £65 if paid within 14 days. That is a change worth flagging, because the council's survey of the site in May 2017 recorded that "Free car parking is provided at the centre". It still is, for the first four hours.

No height restriction is published by the operator or anyone else — Parkopedia's page for the site would not open for us and neither would AccessAble's guide — so if you are driving something tall you will have to judge it on arrival.

By bus

The bus is the one piece of transport information the operator publishes, and it does it by hosting the timetable as a PDF. Town service 302E, "Town Service Bloomfield", runs from Bangor Buscentre via Bloomfield Road and Lisnabreen Crescent to a stop at the shopping centre and on to Ballyree Drive, roughly every 30 minutes, Monday to Friday from about 07:15 to 17:30 and Saturday from about 07:30 to 17:30, with low-floor vehicles. There is no Sunday service — the timetable says so in as many words, and given that the whole centre trades from one o'clock on a Sunday, that is a real gap.

By train

The operator publishes nothing about rail — no station, no distance, no walking time — so we are not printing one. If you are coming by train, plan the last leg to Bangor Buscentre and take the 302E from there, and check the day, because it does not run on Sundays.

Accessibility

Customer toilets, including accessible toilets, are reached via the corridor between Hays Travel and Specsavers, and the baby changing and feeding room is next to them. Wheelchairs are free to borrow, with photographic proof of identity required, and mobility scooters are available to members of Shopmobility Belfast, which the operator notes is free to join. Bloomfield is a JAM Card friendly centre — the Just A Minute card, which lets someone discreetly ask staff for a moment's patience — and a Safe Place partner, offering "confidential support and information to anyone suffering from domestic violence and abuse".

What we could not check: the operator links to an AccessAble access guide from its own homepage, and that guide returned an error every time we tried it. So an independent access audit exists and we have not read it. No Changing Places toilet is mentioned anywhere by the operator, which is not the same as saying there is not one. Phone ahead if either decides your trip.

The shops

The operator's directory listed 70 names when we counted it on 9 September 2026. Its own homepage, the same day, says the centre "offers 50 retailers split between a covered mall and retail warehouse units". The 2024 sale particulars counted 62 units — 49 shopping centre, 6 retail park, 7 standalone on Bloomfield Road South — and press summaries of those particulars said 49. All four numbers are in the table above, because a unit is not a shop.

The anchors, and the leases nobody talks about

Marks and Spencer and Tesco have anchored the mall since the beginning, and the terms on which they sit there are the most interesting fact in the whole sale file. The Savills brochure, reported in February 2024, states that "Both Tesco and Marks & Spencer occupy the property on long leases at a peppercorn rent with expiries in 2115 and 2117 respectively". A peppercorn rent is a nominal one: the two biggest boxes on the site produce almost no income for the landlord and will not do so for another ninety years — which goes a long way to explaining how a centre with £3.3m of rental income and 98% occupancy came to sell for £22m.

The rest of the line-up

Next opened a 35,000 sq ft flagship here in spring 2016 and is the third-largest name. Beyond the anchors the directory runs to TK Maxx, JD Sports, Boots, Superdrug, Smyths Toys, B&M, Poundland, Poundstretcher, The Food Warehouse, Sports Direct, Pets at Home, Harry Corry, Menarys, Waterstones, Holland & Barrett, The Works and Specsavers, plus Danske Bank, four mobile networks, Hays Travel and TUI.

Food, drink and a gym

McDonald's and Starbucks both have drive-thrus, and the McDonald's runs 24 hours on Friday and Saturday. Tim Hortons trades 6am to 11pm seven days a week — the only tenant that ignores the Sunday pattern entirely. Also here: Burger King, Subway, Costa, Ground Espresso Bar, Auntie Anne's, Knotts Bakery, Blue Chicago Grill, Bull & Bear Grill and the M&S Café Revive, plus an Everlast gym open from 6am on weekdays.

What has arrived, and what has gone

Waterstones is the only arrival anyone dates: "due to open" in the February 2024 sale coverage, and trading on the directory today. Tim Hortons, the two drive-thrus, The Food Warehouse, B&M, Poundland, Everlast and WeBuyAnyCar are all present now and absent from the 2017 and 2023 tenant lists, so they arrived somewhere in between — no source dates any of them.

Nobody at Bloomfield publishes closures either, so we did it the other way round, by comparing dated tenant lists against today's directory. None of these departures has a published date and we are not implying one.

• H&M — opened 2013, named in the council's May 2017 survey as one of the mall's headline multiples, not on the directory today.
• River Island — named in the Irish News tenant list of 7 November 2023. Gone by 2026.
• DW Sports and Laura Ashley — both named by the council in May 2017 as retail park occupiers. Both chains subsequently failed nationally.
• Peacocks, Hanna & Browne and the Early Learning Centre — all reported as having closed at Bloomfield by February 2014.

All that proves is that those names were here on the dates given and are not here now. It does not prove when they left.

Useful to know

The four-hour clock is the thing to watch

Four hours free is generous, but the ceiling is six hours, not eight or ten. The charge in hours five and six is £2.20; the charge for hour seven is £100, reduced to £65 if you pay within a fortnight.

Getting in early

Tim Hortons, the McDonald's drive-thru, the Everlast gym and the Tesco petrol station all open at 6am, the Starbucks drive-thru at 6.30am, and Marks and Spencer, Tesco, B&M, Poundland and The Food Warehouse at 8am. The mall proper does not get going until nine. If you want a quiet supermarket run and a coffee before the shops open, that is the window.

Quieter shopping, click and collect, Wi-Fi

Tesco publishes quieter hours on Wednesday and Saturday from 9am to 10am at this store. The centre publishes no quiet hour of its own, but it is a JAM Card friendly centre, which is a different and in some ways more useful thing. The operator says 24 retailers here offer click and collect, naming M&S, Next, Boots and Tesco among them; free Wi-Fi and a documented lost property procedure are on the same services page.

Things nobody publishes

We could find no confirmation of a Changing Places toilet, a gift card scheme, a dogs policy, cash machines, lockers, a prayer or quiet room, coach parking or a taxi rank. Absent from the website is not the same as absent from the centre — most centres this size have cash machines. Phone 028 9127 0797 if one of these decides your trip.

The carbon claim, and two things Bloomfield is not

The 2023–24 sale particulars described Bloomfield as "believed to be the UK's first Carbon Neutral Shopping Centre", and two newspapers repeated it. No certifying body, no scope and no date is attached to that claim by anyone — it is a selling agent's line in a marketing document. And two name traps: Springhill Shopping Centre is a different Bangor scheme, named alongside Bloomfield in the 2011 masterplan but not counted anywhere on this page, and there is a separate Bangor Retail Park in Gwynedd, north Wales that turns up constantly in searches for this one.

How it got here

Bloomfield opened in 1992, was refurbished in 2001 and extended in 2002, and its effect on Bangor is still the thing planners write about. The Bangor Town Centre Masterplan, prepared for the council by URS Scott Wilson Ltd in July 2011, put it first among the town's problems: "Bloomfield Shopping Centre and Springhill Shopping Centre are the key competitors to Bangor Town Centre", and "the retail emphasis shifted away from Bangor town centre to these alternative locations". By the council's own survey in May 2017, Bangor town centre had "the highest vacancy rate within the Borough at 23% of all non-residential units".

Two halves, one owner, two planning designations

The mall and the retail park have always been sold as one lot and run as one scheme, but they sit on opposite sides of a planning line: the council's Local Development Plan position paper designates the mall as "BR 13/01 Bloomfield District Centre" and then says, plainly, that "Bloomfield Retail Park is located immediately adjacent to the mall but outside the boundary of the District Centre".

The receivership, and the man who bought it back

Through the 2000s the centre was owned by Donegall Place Investments Ltd, a joint venture between Michael Herbert's Lebreh Ltd and Pat McCormack. In February 2014, with Peacocks, Hanna & Browne and the Early Learning Centre having closed here and Northern Ireland's shop vacancy rate the worst in the UK, Ulster Bank appointed receivers.

The centre was sold out of that situation to Ellandi and Tristan Capital Partners for £54.5m. The date of that sale is disputed and we are not resolving it: Lisney, which acted for the buyers, announced the completed deal in January 2016; the Irish News, writing in 2023, said they "purchased it in November 2015". Next opened its 35,000 sq ft flagship in the spring that followed.

In November 2023 the centre went back on the market at offers over £22m through CBRE and Savills. In April 2024 it sold — to Michael Herbert's Herbert Group, the same Michael Herbert whose joint venture had lost it to a receiver ten years earlier. He paid about £22m for a centre that had changed hands at £54.5m eight years before: roughly forty pence in the pound.

The Herberts built their money in fast food — dozens of KFC outlets over forty years, and 146 restaurants sold to the Issa brothers' EG Group in 2020 — and have since assembled a Northern Ireland portfolio: Forestside in south Belfast for about £42m, Bloomfield for £22m, and the Abbey Centre in Newtownabbey for £58.8m in June 2025. Two of the three now carry Lesley Herbert's name.

The extension that was announced and then went quiet

On 29 August 2024 the County Down Spectator reported that Herbert intended to "double the size of Bloomfield's". Phase one was to be a front entrance extension of about 9,500 sq ft housing two restaurants and a retail shop, with the car park reconfigured but its capacity maintained and the existing red brick carried across the whole entranceway. The group called it "the biggest investment in Bangor in a generation" and projected 300 new jobs. Planning approval, the paper said, was unlikely before 2025.

We could not establish what happened next. Two years on there is no application reference, council decision, refusal, withdrawal or start on site that we could find. We are not going to tell you the scheme is dead, because nobody has published that either — only that the last public step we can find is the announcement itself. No opening date for any of it appears on this page.

One loose end: the County Down Spectator's February 2024 sale piece mentions Ulster Bank having appointed a fixed charge receiver in the same passage as the marketing by Ellandi and Tristan. The receivership we can document firmly is the February 2014 one, under the previous ownership; whether a receiver was involved in 2024 as well is not established by anything we could read, and we have not written that it was.

If you are looking at Northern Ireland's other big schemes, we have written up Victoria Square in Belfast and Rushmere in Craigavon — the latter being the other Northern Irish destination that pairs a covered mall with an open retail park under one operator.