Bullring, Birmingham: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

Birmingham’s central shopping centre, opened on 4 September 2003 and wrapped around the Selfridges building that put the city on architectural postcards. Two practical things first: the car parks all have a 2.15m height limit, and the tariff is not published anywhere we could reach. Grand Central, above New Street station, is a separate centre marketed alongside it — which matters, because almost every published figure for size, stores and footfall is the two of them added together. Here is what the operator publishes, what it does not, and where the numbers come from.

Last checked 5 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Bullring sits in the middle of Birmingham, between New Street, the markets and St Martin’s church, at B5 4BU. Its website is bullring.co.uk. It opened on 4 September 2003 at a cost of £500m — a date the operator’s own About page does not give, but which the twentieth-anniversary coverage of 4 September 2023 nails down three times over, in the Express & Star, on ITV News Central and in Hammerson’s own release.

The first thing to understand about any number you read for this place is what it is counting. Bullring is marketed jointly with Grand Central, a separate shopping centre that opened above New Street station on 24 September 2015. Nearly every published figure — 1.7 million sq ft, 245 stores, 33 million visitors — is the pair combined. No Bullring-only floor area appears to exist in public at all. On top of that, the Bull Ring markets (Open, Rag and Indoor) belong to Birmingham City Council, not to the centre, and Smithfield next door is the council’s regeneration scheme. Four schemes, one name, endless confusion.

The ownership is now simple, and recently so. Hammerson has owned Bullring and Grand Central outright since 31 July 2025, when it bought CPP Investments’ remaining 50% for £319m. If you find a source describing this as a joint venture with CPPIB, it is out of date. Hammerson also owns the Rotunda and Martineau Galleries nearby, the latter in the path of HS2’s Curzon Street works.

The most useful practical fact on this page is a small one: Grand Central opens at 9am on weekdays and Bullring at 10am. If you are catching a train and want an hour’s shopping first, that hour exists — just not in the building most people head for.

What follows draws on the operator’s own pages, AccessAble’s per-car-park access guides (which turned out to be the only source anywhere for the height limits and bay counts), Hammerson’s own announcements and results disclosures, West Midlands Railway, West Midlands Metro, BirminghamWorld and Historic England. Where two sources disagree, we print both and say who published each. Where the operator publishes nothing — and the parking tariff is the glaring case — we say that instead of guessing.

The new Bullring was a catalyst for the statement architecture we now see in the city.

The essentials

Opening times

These come from bullring.co.uk/opening-hours, checked on 4 September 2026. That bare path is worth knowing, because the homepage, the getting-here page and the About page carry no hours at all — it is easy to conclude the operator publishes none when in fact they are sitting one URL away.

The single most useful line is the Grand Central one. Grand Central opens at 9am Monday to Saturday; Bullring opens at 10am on weekdays and 9am on Saturday. If you arrive by train on a weekday morning, there is an hour of shopping available above the platforms before the main centre unlocks.

We only found one operator hours page, so we cannot rule out a second that disagrees with it. At other centres in this series, two operator pages have routinely given two different answers. Here we checked one and are telling you so.

Car park hours come from AccessAble, not from the operator, and they are genuinely useful: the Centre car park opens at 6.30am on weekdays, Edgbaston Street at 5.30am. Moor Street’s hours are not stated anywhere. The Grand Central car park is open around the clock but the mall above it is not — there is no access through the centre between 11pm and 6am.

The festive schedule below is last year’s and comes from a newspaper. BirminghamWorld, on 27 November 2025, published Christmas Eve 9am–5pm, closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day 9am–8pm, New Year’s Eve 9am–6pm and 1 January 10am–7pm. That is the 2025 pattern, not a 2026 commitment, and the operator publishes no festive or bank holiday hours of its own at all. Neither does it publish Selfridges’ hours or the restaurants’, both of which run later than the malls.

Getting there

By road, and the Clean Air Zone

The operator’s getting-here page does not name a single motorway. Not one. It covers public transport and points people at Citymapper, and that is all — so we are not going to print a junction number that the operator has never published. Use B5 4BU.

Birmingham’s Clean Air Zone applies here and the operator says so. It is the council’s charge, not the centre’s, and it catches older diesels in particular. Check your registration before you drive in; it is the single most expensive mistake available at this destination.

Parking — what is published and what is not

There are four car parks and "over 3,000" spaces:

• Centre — 1,025 spaces with 28 accessible bays on one operator page, 1,015 on another. Both are the operator’s own; we print both. Open 6.30am to midnight Monday to Saturday, 8am to midnight Sunday.
• Moor Street — 1,195 spaces, 78 accessible. Hours not published anywhere.
• Edgbaston Street — 850 spaces, 14 accessible, open 5.30am to midnight daily. This is where the EV charging is.
• Grand Central — 450 spaces, open 24 hours, but with no mall access between 11pm and 6am.

The tariff is not published anywhere we could reach. The rates live at bullring.co.uk/parking/<car-park-name>, and those pages would not load for us; the /parking index refused us as well. There are third-party sites carrying figures that look authoritative and are not, and we are not repeating them. If the cost of parking decides your trip, check on arrival or use the operator’s own pages if they load for you.

The height limit is 2.15m — that is 7ft 1in — on all three main car parks. This comes from AccessAble’s per-car-park access guides, which were the only source anywhere that publishes it. No height limit is published for Grand Central. There is also no published time limit on any of the car parks.

By train

Three stations serve the centre and nobody ranks them or publishes a walking time. West Midlands Railway names Birmingham New Street, Moor Street and Snow Hill without preference, and describes the New Street route in useful terms: "Grand Central is above Birmingham New Street railway station and is linked to The Bullring via a pedestrian overpass". So New Street is the one you want if you would rather not go outside.

By tram

The West Midlands Metro stop you want is called Grand Central, on Stephenson Street, B2 4BL, in Zone 1 — confirmed on westmidlandsmetro.com. Bull Street is a stop further out.

By bus, coach, bike and taxi

Nothing is published. No bus routes, no distance to the coach station, no taxi rank, no cycle parking. For a city-centre destination this size that is a real gap in the operator’s own information, not a claim that these things do not exist.

Accessibility — this is where Bullring is strong

Shopmobility is free. It is on Level -1 of the Centre car park, on 0121 632 1507, open Monday to Friday 10am to 7.30pm, Saturday 9.30am to 7.30pm and Sunday 10.30am to 4.30pm, with no rentals after 5pm (3pm on Sunday). New customers need two forms of ID.

There are two Changing Places toilets — Upper East Mall near Selfridges, and Grand Central Level 2 — with the radar key available from the Customer Service Desk. There are 120 accessible bays across the car parks, and Blue Badge holders do not park free. The centre supports the Waymap app for step-free audio routing, and there are seven main entrances. Birmingham Mind runs a wellbeing hub on Link Street, Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm.

With children

Baby change is spread across the Upper and Lower West Malls, the Middle, Lower and Upper East Malls and Grand Central, with tables at 77 to 102cm. There are parent-and-baby rooms with bottle warming, a family room on West Mall Lower, and parent-and-child bays on Levels 1 and 2 of the Centre car park. Teenie Weenies is a soft play and crèche for ages three to eight; Treetop Adventure Golf is the bigger-children option. The Child Safe Zone scheme hands out free wristbands at the Customer Service Desk.

The shops

The operator’s directory is JavaScript-rendered and gave us nothing, so the names below come from letting announcements, Hammerson’s own releases and Completely Retail’s particulars rather than from a store list. Remember that the 245-store figure is Bullring and Grand Central combined.

The giants

Selfridges at 262,480 sq ft and Marks and Spencer at 209,180 sq ft dominate the floor area. Selfridges trades inside the Bullring footprint, but the freehold and leasehold arrangement between the two is not established in public and we make no claim about it. Other sizes on record: Mango 10,880 sq ft, FootAsylum 11,350 sq ft, and Tortilla.

The Debenhams unit, and the half of it nobody accounts for

The old Debenhams was 19,230 sq m over four floors. On 9 August 2021 Hammerson announced that Marks and Spencer would take the lower two floors as a food-led flagship, quoting Katherine Ottewell, its regional manager; that store was delivered at 65,000 sq ft by early 2024. What happened to the upper two floors is not stated anywhere by anyone. That is a large hole in the middle of a building on the busiest corner of the centre.

What has arrived

In 2023 Hammerson reported 115,000 sq ft of new openings, including Nike Rise, Bershka, Pull & Bear and TAG Heuer, with JD expanding to 27,500 sq ft and Goldsmiths to 8,000 sq ft.

The most unusual letting is more recent. On 21 May 2025 an Aston Villa FC flagship opened next to Selfridges — 10,000 sq ft over two floors, announced with quotes from David Asquith, the club’s VP of Retail, and Paul O’Brien for Hammerson. A football club taking a two-floor store beside Selfridges is not something most centres can arrange.

Søstrene Grene arrived on 19 September 2025 — at Grand Central, not Bullring. That distinction matters if you are making a trip for it. Uniqlo and Victoria’s Secret have both been reported as coming, with no dates, and we could not establish whether either has opened.

What has gone — a sourcing gap, not a clean record

We could not document a single closure at Bullring. Not one, anywhere. That is not the same as saying none has happened; it means neither the operator nor the local press publishes departures here, and we would rather flag the gap than pretend the record is spotless.

The real loss is next door, at Grand Central. John Lewis opened there on 24 September 2015 with 250,000 sq ft, shut in March 2020 for the first lockdown, and its closure was confirmed as permanent on 9 July 2020. Andy Street called the decision "inexplicable". The replacement scheme is Drum — 260,000 sq ft, roughly 200,000 of offices over 40,000 of dining and food retail, by architect Ken Shuttleworth and described by Hammerson’s Harry Badham as "inspired by the 15-minute city". Completion was floated for 2025; as of the coverage of the July 2025 buyout, half the space was still vacant. The current status is unknown.

Useful to know

Come by train, and come to Grand Central first

Grand Central is above New Street, linked to Bullring by a pedestrian overpass, and it opens an hour earlier on weekdays. Between that, the Metro stop of the same name and the Clean Air Zone waiting for older cars, the train is straightforwardly the better way in.

If parking cost matters, find out before you commit

The tariff is genuinely unpublished on any page we could open, and there is no published time limit either. What is published, and worth planning around, is the 2.15m height limit on all three main car parks — that rules out most vans and a fair number of roof boxes. And note that Blue Badge holders are not exempt from charges here.

Accessibility provision is above average

Free Shopmobility, two Changing Places toilets, 120 accessible bays, Waymap audio routing and a wellbeing hub run by Birmingham Mind add up to more than most centres of this size publish. Take two forms of ID if you are a new Shopmobility customer, and note the last-rental times: 5pm, or 3pm on a Sunday.

The markets are not the shopping centre — and they are moving

The Open, Rag and Indoor markets belong to Birmingham City Council. They are being relocated to a temporary Smithfield site, with construction from later in 2026, completion in July 2027 and opening in September 2027 — driven by Hammerson’s lease on the existing market site expiring in October 2027. The indoor market building is to be replaced by Edgbaston Street Gardens, a mix of housing, student beds and green space. Nick Lowe, the council’s Head of Markets, and Harry Badham for Hammerson have both spoken about it.

Things nobody publishes

We could not confirm Wi-Fi, lockers, gift cards, a dogs policy, lost property arrangements, a prayer room or cash machines, and the operator’s own customer services page would not load for us. The contact page carries no telephone number at all — email only — which is why the number in the table above is flagged as third-party.

St Martin in the Bull Ring is worth five minutes

The church sitting below the Selfridges wall is Historic England entry 1075690, Grade II*, listed 25 April 1952, described as "at least late C13 in origin and the mother church of Birmingham". P. C. Hardwick built the tower and spire in 1835-45, J. A. Chatwin rebuilt the church in 1873-75, and the bomb damage was made good in 1956-57. The south transept window is by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co. between 1875 and 1880.

How it got here

There has been a market here since 1166, when Peter de Birmingham obtained the charter, and the name comes from the sixteenth-century practice of bull-baiting on the site. Everything since has been a series of attempts to build something over the top of that.

The immediate predecessor was the 1964 Bull Ring Centre, one of the definitive British post-war shopping schemes and, by the end, one of the least loved. It was demolished in 2000.

The current Bullring opened on 4 September 2003 at a cost of £500m. It was built by the Birmingham Alliance — a partnership of Hammerson, Henderson Global Investors and Land Securities formed in 1999 — to a masterplan by Benoy. The building everyone photographs is Selfridges, by Future Systems, which cost £60m and is clad in 15,000 spun aluminium discs. Robert Bentley of Benoy has said that it "created an icon that Birmingham could then rally around and promote itself on", which is a fair description of what the disc-covered wall has done for the city’s image ever since.

One caution for anyone researching the building. A search of the national heritage list for "Selfridges" returns only the London Oxford Street store (entry 1357436, Grade II*). The listing status of the Birmingham Selfridges building is unconfirmed, and the London entry must never be cited as though it were this one.

Grand Central followed on 24 September 2015, above the rebuilt New Street station, with John Lewis at 250,000 sq ft as its anchor. That store closed in March 2020 and was confirmed as permanently shut on 9 July 2020, and the space is being turned into Drum — a 260,000 sq ft office-led scheme by Ken Shuttleworth, still substantially vacant as of mid-2025.

The ownership story is one of consolidation. Bullring was built by a three-party alliance; it ended up half Hammerson and half CPP Investments; and on 31 July 2025 Hammerson bought CPP’s half for £319m and took the whole thing, Grand Central included. Rita-Rose Gagne, Hammerson’s chief executive, spoke to that deal. Management is now in house, under Toby Tait, Paul O’Brien and Harry Badham.

The next chapter is being written next door. Birmingham City Council is moving its Open, Rag and Indoor markets into a temporary Smithfield site — construction from later in 2026, completion July 2027, opening September 2027 — because Hammerson’s lease on the existing market site expires in October 2027. The indoor market building is due to be replaced by Edgbaston Street Gardens. A market that has been on this site in some form since 1166 is being moved by the expiry of a commercial lease, which is as good a summary of the modern Bullring as you will find.