Clarks Village, Street: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

Britain's first factory outlet village opened on the site of the Clarks shoe factory in Street on 14 August 1993, and 50,000 people came in the first weekend. It is owned today by Landsec. Here is what the record shows about the shops, the hours, getting there and the listed buildings you will be walking past — and a frank account of how much the operator's own website would not let us read.

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

Clarks Village sits on Farm Road in Street, a Somerset town that made shoes for the best part of two centuries, and it is built into the buildings that made them. It opened on 14 August 1993, and the claim its own management makes for it is a big one: the first factory outlet village in the United Kingdom. Chris Davis, its centre director, put it that way himself at the 30th anniversary in July 2023.

The owner is Landsec. That matters because older listings still attach this village to Realm, the specialist outlet operator, and that is out of date. We confirmed Landsec three separate ways: its own property listing, the "(c) Land Securities Group 2026" line in the operator site footer, and a February 2026 planning report naming "Landsec U+I". What nobody publishes is how Landsec came to own it — no sale, no price, no seller, no date, in any source we checked.

Now the awkward part, and we would rather lead with it than bury it. The operator's own website is almost entirely JavaScript-gated, and it is the worst example we have run into. The opening-hours page, the parking page and both versions of the getting-here page all returned their headings with completely empty bodies — the parking page carries the headings "Our car parks", "Car park charges", "Accessible parking" and "Electric vehicle charging points" with nothing whatsoever underneath any of them. So the most basic question a driver has, is parking free here, is one we genuinely cannot answer, and we are not going to guess.

What follows is therefore assembled from Landsec's own property page, Historic England, local and trade press, a Tourism For All accessibility guide, Visit Somerset and the fragments of the operator site that did render. Every third-party figure is labelled with who published it, both sides of every conflict are printed, and where nobody publishes something at all we say so.

As the first ever outlet to open in the UK, it's a great honour.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked 4 and 5 September 2026, and none of this comes from the operator's opening-hours page. That page exists and returns its headings with an entirely empty body, so there is no operator table to read. The times above come instead from a Somerset Leveller story of 18 July 2024 reporting that hours had been extended for the summer, which printed the full pattern: Monday to Saturday 9am to 7pm except Thursday 9am to 8pm, and Sunday 10am to 5pm with larger stores from 11am.

That pattern cross-checks against the operator's own homepage strapline, which on 4 September 2026 still said Monday to Saturday until 7pm and Thursdays until 8pm. Two sources agreeing two years apart is why we are comfortable printing it.

There is one unresolved variant, and we are printing it rather than hiding it. A post on the village's own X account, carrying no date we could confirm, gives Saturday 9am to 6pm, Sunday 10am to 5pm and bank holiday Monday 9am to 6pm. That reads like the pre-extension pattern, but we cannot date it, so we cannot tell you whether it has been superseded. If you are relying on a late Saturday afternoon, ring 01458 840064 first.

What the operator does publish is that larger stores open at 11am on Sunday rather than 10am, and it names them: Calvin Klein, Clarks, M&S Outlet, Next, Tommy Hilfiger, The North Face, Sports Direct, Superdry and the Homeware Pavilion. Restaurants keep their own later hours. No bank holiday schedule and no Christmas or New Year 2026 hours are published anywhere by anyone.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode BA16 0BB. We are not printing a motorway junction as the way in: the operator does not publish one, because its getting-here page renders nothing at all in either of the two versions we tried. There is no operator route to follow.

For context only, and clearly attributed: the accessibility charity Tourism For All describes Clarks Village as about 20 minutes from junction 23 of the M5 via the A39, about 20 minutes from the A303 at the Podimore roundabout, and about five minutes from Glastonbury. That is a third party writing an access guide, not the landlord giving directions, and we have not adopted it as ours — put the postcode in your satnav and treat those timings as a rough sense of where in Somerset you are heading.

Parking

This is the biggest hole on the page. We cannot tell you whether parking here is free. The operator has a parking page; it renders the headings "Our car parks", "Car park charges", "Accessible parking" and "Electric vehicle charging points" with no text underneath any of them. That is not us failing to look, it is the page failing to deliver.

What exists is third-party. Tourism For All records 1,400 spaces, seven free coach spaces plus a coach drop-off point, accessible parking within 50 metres of the main entrance, and electric vehicle charging points in "car park two". We have no space count from the operator, no maximum stay, nobody named as enforcing the car parks and no height restriction from anyone. Arrive expecting to pay and you cannot be caught out.

By train

Street has no railway station, and there is no National Rail days-out page for the village either. Tourism For All names Castle Cary and Taunton as the stations you would take a taxi from, and mentions taxis from Bristol Airport. No source publishes a distance, journey time or fare for any of those.

By bus

Again from Tourism For All rather than the operator: the 376 between Bristol and Street and the 27 between Taunton and Street. No timetable, frequency or stop location appears in any source we could read, so check with the bus operator before relying on it.

Accessibility

Less than we would like, and for a specific reason. AccessAble has surveyed guides for Clarks Village — separate ones for Car Park 1, Car Park 2, Getting Help, Grange Terrace and Pear Court — and every one refused to render across five attempts, returning AccessAble's own homepage instead. So we have no bay counts, no dimensions, no confirmation of mobility scooter hire and none of a Changing Places toilet. Those guides exist and are worth trying yourself.

What we can attribute: Visit Somerset states that all stores are on ground level and that Guest Services staff are trained in hidden disabilities, and Tourism For All records accessible parking within 50 metres of the main entrance. That is the whole of the verified accessibility record.

The shops

There is no current shop list on this page, and here is why. The operator's store directory is JavaScript-gated like the rest of the site and would not yield its contents. We also tried the usual workaround — the gift-card acceptance list, often the only machine-readable roster a village publishes — and Clarks Village does not publish one we could find. The operator says "over 90" brands; Visit Somerset says "over 75 stores and 90 brands". Neither is dated and we could not count for ourselves. The village advertises up to 60% off RRP, with no published methodology behind that figure, so read it as a marketing claim rather than a measured one.

What we can give you is every name that appears in a source we are willing to cite, and where each comes from.

Named by Landsec on its own property page

Bill's, Wagamama, BOSS, Hotel Chocolat, Barbour, Lindt, Sweaty Betty and Salomon.

Named by the operator as opening at 11am on Sunday

Calvin Klein, Clarks, M&S Outlet, Next, Tommy Hilfiger, The North Face, Sports Direct, Superdry and the Homeware Pavilion — the larger units, which is useful to know in itself.

Arrivals and moves that carry a date

• Crocs — opened 27 February 2026.
• The Gift Company — relocated within the village to Central Square Gardens, mid-February 2026.
• Christy — April 2026, 1,059 sq ft, the towel and bedding brand's third UK outlet.
• Sunglass Hut — relocated to Apple Court on 9 May 2025, reported at 944 sq m.
• The North Face — also in Apple Court, reported at 2,895 sq m.
• Suit Direct, Raging Bull and Osprey — all refitted by May 2025.

Those last two floor areas are printed exactly as reported, but both look far more like square feet than square metres for shops of that kind. Correcting a published figure on a hunch is how errors get laundered into facts, so we have flagged them rather than changed them. Treat both as unreliable.

The fullest named list that exists

The most complete roster we found anywhere is a reopening schedule published by Street Nub News on 16 July 2021, listing more than 40 brands as the village came back from the COVID closures. It is five years old, predates every arrival above, and we have not reprinted it as today's line-up. If you want to know what is trading this week, ring 01458 840064.

What has closed

Nothing, as far as the public record goes. No closure or departure at Clarks Village has been reported by any source we checked, in either round of research. That is unusual for a village of this age, and it more likely means the local reporting is thin than that nothing has ever left. We are recording the absence, not claiming a perfect occupancy record.

A live planning application

Application 2026/0132/FUL, reported on 3 February 2026, would split the Next Clearance unit — unit 71 — and its toilet block into units 71 and 71A, with a new shopfront by The Harris Partnership. No incoming occupier is named and Next's own position is not stated. We took this from the local paper because Somerset Council's planning portal is not searchable, so we cannot say whether it has since been decided.

Useful to know

Eating and drinking

Bill's and Wagamama are named by Landsec, and Pizza Express by the operator in its restaurant hours; Hotel Chocolat and Lindt are on Landsec's list too. Restaurants run later than the shops — to at least 9pm, some to 10pm midweek and 11pm at weekends — so an early evening meal after closing time is realistic.

The ice rink

There is one, at Christmas. We know that only because Landsec's trading update for the Christmas 2025 quarter reported ice rink use up 21% year on year. No dates, prices, session times or booking arrangements are published anywhere we could read, so treat its existence as confirmed and everything else about it as unknown.

Dogs, and the lie of the land

Visit Somerset says dogs are welcome in most stores — a third party rather than the operator, and "most" is doing some work in that sentence, so expect to be turned away from a few. The same source records that all the stores are on ground level, which for a converted factory site is genuinely useful to know before you set out.

Things nobody publishes

This list is longer here than on almost any page we have written, and every item is something we looked for and could not find from anyone: toilets, baby changing, cash machines, lockers, Wi-Fi, tax-free shopping, gift cards, a play area and the events programme. A village of this size will have toilets; we are simply not going to tell you where they are on the strength of an assumption. Phone 01458 840064 before you travel. And if you have come for the shoe history, read on — the Shoemakers Museum is a separate place on a separate site.

How it got here

Street is a shoe town, and Clarks Village stands in the middle of the evidence. Clark's has been on this site since 1825, the buildings around the shops are the factory, and several of them are listed.

Historic England's entry 1058755 gives the group Grade II status, listed on 13 January 1986, and covers the main roadside frontage to the Clarks factory, the clock tower, a five-bay right return and the water tower, at 40 High Street. The listing dates them individually. The frontage of 1898 is by William Reynolds, in what the listing calls a "loose Domestic Revival style", with projecting gables and decorative oriels; the clock tower of 1887 is by G. J. Skipper, "mock-medieval", with four faces in Roman numerals; the water tower of 1897 is Reynolds again, six storeys tall; and Alfred Sturge Clarks House of 1855 is built into the frontage. Coursed squared rubble, under triple Roman tile roofs. A second listing at 31 to 37 Farm Road, entry 1392560, would not open for us, so we cannot tell you what it covers.

The village is a conversion of that factory, and the numbers from its 30th anniversary in July 2023 are unusually precise. It opened on 14 August 1993. The conversion cost £3m and was carried out in 22 weeks. There were eight original brands: Benetton, Clarks, Dartington Crystal, Farah, Laura Ashley, Pierre Cardin, Thorntons and Wrangler. It created more than 300 jobs, 15,000 plants were brought in for the central gardens, and around 50,000 people came in the opening weekend. The one thing that coverage does not give, and we could not find anywhere else, is the name of the developer.

Two things that are easy to run together, and should not be. First, C&J Clark the shoemaker and the village's landlord are different companies — the shoes and the shopping share a name and a site, not an owner. Second, the Shoemakers Museum is not at Clarks Village. It is the Alfred Gillett Trust's, at The Grange in Street, and it opened on 18 September 2025, its cafe three days earlier. It occupies a new two-storey gallery between the manor house and the Barn, with three galleries holding the C&J Clark heritage collection the trust acquired in 2021, and fossils in the refurbished Barn. The old shoe museum on the factory site is closed. If you have travelled for the museum, you want The Grange.

On ownership, the honest position is that we know the who and not the when. Landsec owns Clarks Village today — confirmed by Landsec's own property listing, by the "(c) Land Securities Group 2026" line in the operator site footer, and by a February 2026 planning report naming "Landsec U+I". No transaction is on the record at all: no reported sale, no price, no named seller and no date, anywhere in operator, corporate, trade or council sources. A 2018 Landsec results document turned up in search and hints the ownership may predate 2018 rather than being a recent purchase, but we could not open it and will not build a date on it. Anyone quoting a year Landsec bought Clarks Village is going beyond the published record.

One warning, because it is a trap we walked up to ourselves: a trade story about a Yorkshire outlet bought by Land Securities is not about Clarks Village, which is in Somerset. Do not let anyone cite it here.