Central Retail Park, Falkirk: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 400,000 sq ft retail and leisure park on Grahams Road, right beside Falkirk town centre and next door to Falkirk Grahamston station, anchored by Tesco, M&S Foodhall, Next, Dunelm and TK Maxx with a 12-screen Cineworld behind them. This is the Falkirk one. The Central Retail Park on Great Ancoats Street in Manchester is a different place and it is gone. British Land bought this one on 2 October 2024. Here is what could be verified, what two sources disagree about, and the fairly 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.

Central Retail Park sits on Grahams Road in Falkirk, entered from the Grahams Road roundabout, with an internal road running through the site and a branch out to Galloway Street. It is a large, flat, open-air retail and leisure park — Tesco with a petrol station at one end, a run of big boxes, a 12-screen cinema, a health club and the usual food and drink units. Its postcode is FK1 1LW.

Before anything else: make sure you have the right Central Retail Park. There is another scheme of exactly the same name on Great Ancoats Street in Manchester. Its shops closed in 2019 and 2020 and the site was cleared by Manchester City Council for offices and civic buildings. Everything on this page is about Falkirk, which is trading normally and was described as fully occupied when it changed hands in 2024. If you are searching and you hit a story about a demolished retail park, you have landed on the wrong one.

The unusual thing about this park is how close it is to the town centre. Most of the parks we write about are out in a field by a motorway. This one is a few minutes' walk from Falkirk's high street and sits directly beside Falkirk Grahamston railway station. That proximity has just had a formal consequence: on 4 September 2026 businesses voted to renew the Falkirk Delivers Business Improvement District for a fifth term, and the new boundary takes in Central Retail Park for the first time. The retail park is now inside the town-centre BID rather than being treated as its competition.

Now the bad news about sourcing, because it shapes this entire page. The park does have its own website — crpfalkirk.co.uk — and we can prove it exists, because Google has indexed its shopping directory, its category pages, a click-and-collect page and a contact page, all titled "Central Retail Park Falkirk". We could not read a single one of them. Every attempt was refused at the network layer before the site was ever contacted. British Land's own portfolio page for the asset returned a 404 twice. So there is no operator source anywhere on this page: no operator hours, no operator parking statement, no operator directions, no operator accessibility page. Everything below comes from tenants, letting agents, planning papers, company filings, trade press and the local newspaper.

That means we print both figures more often than usual. Two sources give the floor area and they differ by 45,000 sq ft. Four sources count the shops and get four answers. The tenants and the directories disagree about what time the place shuts on a Saturday. Where that happens we say who published each figure and we do not pick one.

are serving the same customers and facing the same challenges

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on 13 September 2026, and not one of these times comes from the park's own website, because that website could not be reached. What we have instead is two tenants and two directories, and they do not fully agree.

The two tenants agree exactly with each other. Next, at Unit 2, and Mountain Warehouse, at Unit 3A, both publish 9am to 8pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm on Saturday and 10am to 6pm on Sunday. Two independent retailers publishing identical hours on their own store-finder pages is the strongest evidence available here, and it is the version we would trust.

The two park-level directories both say something different at the weekend. UK Malls and Occupi both give Saturday as 9am to 6pm and Sunday as 10am to 5pm — an hour less on each. We have printed both versions rather than picking. In fairness to everyone, a retail park does not have a single closing time: each unit trades its own hours, and a park-level figure is always an approximation of a dozen different ones.

Tesco is the outlier and the useful one. It trades 6am to midnight, every day, with the petrol station open from 6am and the pharmacy from 8am on weekdays. If you need the park early or late, Tesco is the answer and nothing else on the site will be open. One caution: Tesco's own store page still carried a banner saying hours had been "temporarily amended … until 27th July 2025", more than a year out of date on the day we read it, so that page is stale in at least one respect.

Christmas, New Year and Scottish public holidays are a blank. Nobody publishes them — not the operator, not the tenants, not the directories. Scotland's public holidays are not England's, and Falkirk keeps its own local holidays, so do not assume an English bank-holiday pattern. Mountain Warehouse is the only source of any holiday time at all: 9am to 8pm on bank holidays and closed on Christmas Day, for its own shop only.

Getting there

By road

Use FK1 1LW. There is no motorway junction number on this page and that is deliberate. The operator's website is the only party that would publish one and we cannot reach it, so there is nothing to quote. We are not going to guess: a wrong junction sends people ten miles the wrong way, which is worse than no junction at all.

What we can tell you is how the site works on the ground. The park is entered from the Grahams Road roundabout, and Falkirk Council's street records show an internal road running through the park with a branch out to Galloway Street. The letting particulars describe a "prominent roadside position", which for once is fair — this is a town-edge park on a main road, not a hidden one.

Parking

Parking is free with a four-hour maximum stay. Beyond those two facts, everything else about the car park is crowd-sourced from Parkopedia and unconfirmed by the landlord: 1,400 uncovered spaces, a separate two-hour limit on the Tesco section, enforcement by Highview Parking Ltd, disabled bays, and a Safer Parking Award. Occupi gives 650 spaces instead, which is one of several reasons we do not use Occupi.

The four hours is worth thinking about before you go. This park has a 12-screen cinema, a Nando's, a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut and a health club on it. A film and a meal will comfortably exceed four hours, and Parkopedia's own reviewers complain about exactly that. We could find no published arrangement — validation, a cinema exemption, anything — that deals with it. If you are making an evening of it, that is a question worth asking at the cinema desk rather than discovering afterwards.

No height restriction is published by anyone. There is no published coach parking and no published taxi rank.

By train

Falkirk Grahamston station is next door. Both letting agents describe the park as "adjacent to Falkirk Grahamston Station", and the station has direct services to Edinburgh and Glasgow. This is genuinely one of the best-connected retail parks in Scotland for anyone without a car.

But no walking distance or time is published by anybody — not the agents, not the operator, not the railway. "Adjacent" is the whole of it, and we are not going to invent a number of minutes.

Falkirk High is not the station for this park. Falkirk has two stations; Falkirk High is on the Edinburgh to Glasgow main line on the other side of town. If you are buying a ticket, buy it to Grahamston.

By bus

Nothing is published. No route numbers, no stop names, no operator statement — from anyone. Falkirk's bus station is in the town centre, which is a short walk away, but we cannot tell you which services stop at the park itself. This is a real gap and it is the operator's website that would normally fill it.

On foot

The park adjoins Falkirk town centre and the new Business Improvement District boundary treats the two as one trading area, running along Grahams Road and taking in part of Galloway Street and Meeks Road. Walking between the high street and the retail park is plainly a normal thing to do here in a way that it is not at most out-of-town parks. No published walking route or distance exists, though.

Accessibility

This is the weakest part of the record and we would rather say so than pad it. There is no AccessAble guide for the park, no Euan's Guide entry we could find, no published Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility scheme, no quiet hour and no operator accessibility page we could read. Parkopedia records disabled bays in the car park. Tesco's own store page lists accessible parking, automatic doors, a defibrillator and toilets with grab rails — but those are Tesco's facilities, inside Tesco, not the park's.

In practical terms a flat, single-storey, open-air park with a large car park is usually easier to manage than a multi-level mall. That is a reasonable expectation rather than a published fact, and if a specific facility decides your trip, phone ahead.

The shops

The letting agents name the anchors as Tesco, Dunelm, Next, M&S Foodhall and TK Maxx, with a 12-screen Cineworld and a Bannatyne Health Club providing the leisure. Note that the M&S here trades under the name Falkirk Retail Park Foodhall on M&S's own store list, not as "Central Retail Park", which is one of the small ways this place confuses search engines.

Who else is there

Drawn from the letting particulars, the directories and the retailers' own store pages: Next Home (a second, separate Next unit), Currys, The Range, Smyths Toys, Sports Direct, JD, Boots, Superdrug, Argos, Halfords, Hobbycraft, Pets at Home, Vets4Pets, Bensons for Beds, Carpetright, Clarks, Mountain Warehouse and The Food Warehouse. Food and drink: McDonald's, Nando's, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and Costa.

A few unit sizes are published in the agents' tenant schedule, which gives a sense of the scale: Sports Direct 12,040 sq ft, Next 9,534 sq ft, Boots 7,854 sq ft, Superdrug 4,924 sq ft, Mountain Warehouse 4,166 sq ft.

The cinema

The Cineworld opened on 6 April 2001 with 12 screens and 2,300 seats. Its postal address is still recorded in several places as "Central Retail Park, Old Bison Works, Falkirk" — a quiet survival of what stood on this ground before the retail park did. We could not read Cineworld's own page for the site; it refused our request.

What has arrived, with dates

• The Food Warehouse — opened 12 April 2022. Both STV News and the Falkirk Herald name the date.
• A hot-food snack van — approved 1 November 2023. The park's then owner applied on 26 July 2023 for a van on the patch of land south-west of Unit 7, and planning officers approved it under delegated powers. Whether it ever actually opened is not published anywhere.

What has gone — and the date is disputed

Mothercare is the one documented departure, and the same newspaper carries two different dates for it. The planning papers, quoted by the Falkirk Herald, say Unit 17 "has had no permanent occupier since November 2019 when Mothercare went into administration and vacated the premises". The Herald's own news reporting, and STV's, both say the shop closed in January 2020. Those are not necessarily contradictory — a chain can enter administration in one month and the shutters come down in another — but nobody reconciles them, so we have printed both.

Frankie & Benny's appeared on the park's tenant list in 2020 coverage and is not on any current listing. No closure was ever reported, so we are not writing it as one. It is simply absent.

Beyond those, nothing has been dated since November 2023 in anything we could read. No arrivals, no departures, no lettings announcements. That is partly because the operator's website — which is where a park announces its own news — is unreachable.

The unit that has been empty for six years

Unit 17, the old Mothercare, has a small planning history of its own. In April 2022 the owner applied to change its use from retail to Class 11 assembly and leisure — a Scottish planning class that covers a cinema, concert hall, bingo hall, casino, dance hall, discotheque, swimming bath, skating rink, gymnasium or sports facility. The council approved it on 17 June 2022, on the basis that it would "provide additional options for the landlord in seeking a new permanent occupier".

Four years on, no source names an occupier. The permission is fully documented and the outcome is not documented at all. If you have read a headline about a concert hall or a sports venue coming to Falkirk's retail park, that headline was describing the list of things the planning class permits, not a scheme anybody has announced.

Useful to know

The BID is the live story

On 4 September 2026 Falkirk businesses voted to renew the Falkirk Delivers Business Improvement District for a fifth five-year term, 2026 to 2031, by 90.36% of businesses voting and 86.66% by rateable value. It is described as Scotland's longest-running BID and has now passed its eighteenth year.

The new boundary includes Central Retail Park for the first time, together with part of Meeks Road, numbers 1 to 48a Grahams Road, part of Galloway Street and McFarlane Street. That is an unusual arrangement: out-of-centre retail parks are normally outside town-centre BIDs and are usually cast as the reason the high street is struggling. The council report backing the extension argued the opposite — that the town centre and the park are serving the same customers and facing the same challenges. The practical upshot for shoppers should be the same street ambassadors, the same Shop Safe Radio scheme and the same events programme covering both.

Falkirk Council's contribution to the BID in the current year was £41,000 in cash plus in-kind billing support worth about £6,000.

Getting in early or late

Tesco trades 6am to midnight, seven days, and its petrol station opens at 6am. Nothing else on the park comes close. If you want a quiet run at the supermarket, that is your window — and the four-hour parking limit is irrelevant at 7am.

Go by train

Falkirk Grahamston station is next door to the park and runs direct to Edinburgh and Glasgow. Given a four-hour car park limit and a 12-screen cinema, the train is the better answer for an evening out. Buy your ticket to Grahamston, not Falkirk High.

Tesco is doing a lot of the heavy lifting

Because so little is published at park level, it is worth knowing what Tesco's own store page confirms on site: a petrol filling station, a pharmacy, a Costa, a Tesco café, F&F clothing, Scan as you Shop, a cash machine, Coinstar, a photo kiosk, National Lottery, battery and soft-plastic recycling, and toilets with grab rails. Several of those are the only confirmed instance of that facility anywhere on the park.

Things nobody publishes

We could not confirm park-level toilets, free Wi-Fi, a gift card, a lost property arrangement, baby changing, a prayer or quiet room, a dogs policy, a Changing Places toilet, a Shopmobility scheme, coach parking, a taxi rank, cycle parking or any electric vehicle charging. The park's own site has a "Click & Collect" page, so some scheme exists, but we could not read what it says. Absent from the readable internet is not the same as absent from the park — most of these things probably exist. It means only that the one website that would confirm them is unreachable, and the third-party directories do not carry that level of detail.

Nearby, for comparison

If you are shopping the central belt, Springkerse Retail Park in Stirling is the obvious neighbour, and Glasgow Fort and The Gyle Shopping Centre in Edinburgh are both within easy reach for a bigger day out. For outlet shopping, Livingston Designer Outlet is roughly midway between Falkirk and Edinburgh.

How it got here

Nobody publishes a reliable opening year for this park. A LoopNet listing says 1993 and the aggregator Occupi says 1992, and neither is a source we are prepared to print as fact. Falkirk Council's own museum collections hold photographs catalogued as "Site for Central Retail Park, Falkirk, before construction" and "Central Retail Park buildings during construction", which would very probably settle it — but the collections website refused our requests and we could not read the catalogue dates. That is the honest position: the park has been there for roughly thirty years and the precise year is not something we can stand behind.

What was there before is recorded in an address. The Cineworld's postal address is still given in several places as "Central Retail Park, Old Bison Works, Falkirk". Falkirk is an ironfounding town with a long industrial record, and this corner of it carried a Bison concrete works before the shops arrived. The name has outlived the factory by a quarter of a century simply because somebody typed it into a postal database.

The park was built in at least two phases, and that comes from a planning document rather than from guesswork: the officer's report on a 2023 application describes the small patch of land it concerned as having been created "when the retail park's second phase opened", on ground where an earlier structure was demolished during that second phase. The oldest section is the row containing Halfords, Currys and TK Maxx, identified as such in a 2022 application to replace its shopfronts — an application which argued, in its own words, that they "are unquestionably outdated and do not meet the demands of a modern retailer". The Cineworld opened on 6 April 2001, which gives one firm date inside the sequence.

The ownership history is unusually well documented, because it all happened inside one company. Company number 04295313 was incorporated on 27 September 2001 as Branchtable Limited. Within weeks it was renamed Grantchester Developments (Falkirk) Limited. In May 2021 it became Corona Vulcan Falkirk Limited. In October 2024 it became BL Falkirk Limited, which is what it is today, with British Land Company Secretarial Limited as its secretary. Its registered office moved in step: from Kings Place, 90 York Way — Hammerson's head office — to Level 26, One Canada Square, and then to 20 Triton Street, which is British Land's. Three landlords, three addresses, one company number.

Hammerson spent four years trying to get out. It decided in 2018 to leave UK retail parks altogether. In February 2020 it agreed to sell seven parks including Falkirk to Orion Capital Managers for £400m, described at the time as the largest UK retail parks portfolio sale in a decade. Hammerson's then chief executive David Atkins said the company had "exited the retail parks sector". It had not. Orion renegotiated and then, in April 2020, the deal collapsed. The park went back on the market and in 2021 the portfolio went to Brookfield for £330m — an 8% discount to its book value of £357m at the end of 2020. Local reporting in April 2021 had put the talks at "approximately £350m"; that was a pre-completion figure and the completed price was £330m.

British Land bought it on 2 October 2024, as one of seven retail parks acquired from Brookfield for £441m at a 6.7% net initial yield, rising to 7.2% topped up. The other six were Elliott's Field in Rugby, Wellington Retail Park in Waterlooville, Ravenhead in St Helens, Cleveland Retail Park in Middlesbrough, Telford Forge and Chilwell Retail Park in Nottingham. Falkirk accounted for 18% of the portfolio's value — the second largest of the seven — and the portfolio was reported as fully occupied. British Land part-funded the purchase with a £301m equity raise. Its chief executive, Simon Carter, said the acquisition "builds upon our market leading position in retail parks". No ownership percentage is published for this specific park, and the "100% occupied" figure in the announcement refers to occupancy, not to equity.

One note for anyone researching the buildings: Scotland's designation body is Historic Environment Scotland, not Historic England, and its records sit on Canmore and the HES portal. We were not able to run those searches before our research budget ran out, so we cannot tell you whether anything on or beside this site is listed. We are recording that as unchecked rather than as "nothing listed", which would be a different and unearned claim.