Clifton Moor Centre, York: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

York’s big out-of-town retail cluster sits on the A1237 ring road three miles north of the Minster, and the first thing to understand about it is that “Clifton Moor Centre” is a street name, not a shopping centre. Four separately-marketed schemes trade here under variations of the same name, two of them owned by one landlord and two by others. Here is which is which, who owns what, what each of them publishes, and the surprisingly long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 10 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Clifton Moor is where York does its bulky shopping. It sits on the northern edge of the city, fronting the A1237 York Outer Ring Road, about three miles from the city centre, and it is the largest concentration of retail warehousing in the region — around 575,000 sq ft of it, according to the marketing brochures for the individual parks within it.

The complication is the name. "Clifton Moor Centre" is the postal address of Tesco Extra, of Boots Opticians and of the Vue cinema. It is a road. It is not the name of a shopping centre, and there is no single operator, no single website, no customer services desk and no centre management phone number for the place as a whole. What there is instead is four schemes: Clifton Moor (Phase I), Clifton Moor Retail Park (Phase II), Clifton Moor Retail Park (Phase III) and Clifton Moor Leisure Park. They have four different postcodes and at least two different landlords.

The owner of Phases I and III is 9Yards, a retail-warehouse platform that presents both together on its own site as "9Yards York" — around 275,000 sq ft and 23 units. Melford Capital is the name that appears in the trade coverage of the purchases and the letting agent describes it as advising. Phase II is somebody else's entirely, and who that somebody is has not been published anywhere we could find. The leisure park runs its own separate website.

One thing to get out of the way before you set off: Vangarde Shopping Park and Monks Cross are not at Clifton Moor. They are a different out-of-town cluster on the other side of York, at Huntington, four-odd miles away across the ring road. The cinema at Clifton Moor is a Vue; the Odeon people mention in the same breath is the Monks Cross one. Getting those two confused is the single most common mistake in write-ups of York's out-of-town retail, and quite a lot of the internet makes it.

What follows comes from 9Yards' own pages, the leisure park's own pages, the letting agents' brochures for each phase, Tesco's and B&Q's store pages, a City of York Council character-area statement, AccessAble, the trade press coverage of four separate transactions, and one independent local news report. Where sources disagree — and on parking spaces here they disagree five ways — we print all of them and say who published each. Where nobody publishes something, we say that too, and at Clifton Moor that list is long.

Clifton Moor is a local and sub-regional centre with limited appeal for tourists and other visitors.

The essentials

Opening times

There are no park opening hours at Clifton Moor, and that is not an oversight on our part. We checked 9Yards' own York page, the Clifton Moor Leisure Park site including its park-information page, and every agent's brochure for all three retail phases. Not one of them publishes a time. This is a landlord that lets big boxes to big-box retailers, each of which sets its own hours; there is no mall to open and close, so nobody publishes a schedule for one.

The usual fallbacks did not apply either. Where an operator's own hours cannot be read, we normally use Next, H&M or Mango's store pages, because those three publish server-rendered hours for the schemes they sit in. None of the three is a tenant at Clifton Moor — this is a bulky-goods and value park, not a fashion park. So the times above come from the two anchors that do publish, Tesco and B&Q, checked directly on their own store pages on 10 September 2026.

The genuinely useful fact is the Sunday one. Both anchors close at 4pm on a Sunday, which is early — Tesco Extra is a large store bound by Sunday trading rules and B&Q keeps the same six hours. If you are planning a Sunday run for a kitchen or a sofa, treat mid-afternoon as the cut-off rather than early evening.

Two smaller ones. Tesco opens at 6am Monday to Saturday and its petrol station runs 24 hours, so the site is never entirely shut. And Tesco publishes its own quieter shopping times for this store: Wednesday and Saturday, 9am to 10am.

Boots is a gap. The Boots Opticians page for the Clifton Moor Centre branch on Stirling Road was blocked by robots.txt and could not be read, so no Boots hours appear above. Do not assume they match either anchor.

Getting there

By road — and there is no motorway junction to give you

Nobody publishes a motorway junction for Clifton Moor, so we are not printing one. The owner's entire published road guidance is four words: the park is "located fronting the A1237". Savills, marketing Phase II, puts it slightly more usefully — the park fronts the A1237 York Outer Ring Road and is accessible via Clifton Moor Gate and Stirling Road. The Phase III brochure of May 2025 adds that the A1237 alongside carries 23,500 car movements a day, which tells you more about the queues than any junction number would.

Use the postcode that matches the shop you want, because there are four and they are not interchangeable:

• YO30 4XZ — Phase I: Tesco Extra, Boots, DFS, Wren, Oak Furnitureland, Costa, Pets at Home, Burger King
• YO30 4XU — Phase II and B&Q: Dunelm, B&M, Matalan, Tenpin, Iceland, Dreams, Carpetright
• YO30 4WR — Phase III, Hurricane Way: Home Bargains, Smyths, The Food Warehouse, Currys, Sofology, Oxygen
• YO30 4XY — Clifton Moor Leisure Park: Vue, Bella Italia, Hungry Horse, Caramba, Pure Padel

The only turn-by-turn directions any operator here publishes are the leisure park's, and they route you out from the middle of York rather than in off the ring road. In its own words: "Located 3 miles north of the City Centre. Take the A1036 Gillygate then bear left onto B1363 Clarance Street for 0.2miles" — their spelling of Clarence — then on along the B1363 Wigginton Road through two roundabouts and first exit onto Stirling Road. An unofficial guide to the park puts the distance at 2.5 miles rather than three. Neither figure is worth arguing about; both mean twenty minutes out of town on a bad day.

Parking

Parking is free everywhere at Clifton Moor. That is the one thing every source agrees on. The three-hour limit comes from 9Yards, which states it for both of its phases — 540 free spaces at Phase I and 680 at Phase III, "subject to 3 hour limit". No enforcement company or ANPR contractor is named by anyone, so how the limit is policed, if it is, is not something we can tell you.

The space counts are a mess and we are printing all of them. 9Yards says 540 and 680. Its own letting agent says 1,300 for Phase I on one page and 749 for Phase III on another — that Phase III figure broken down as 623 standard, 66 staff, 52 disabled and 8 parent-and-child, which is more than 9Yards' 680 even before you take the staff bays out. Savills gives 750 for Phase II. The leisure park gives 679, being 650 standard, 26 disabled and three parent-and-child. An unofficial guide says "over 1,300 free parking spaces across Clifton Moor", which is roughly what you get if you add 9Yards' two numbers together and ignore the other two schemes entirely.

No height restriction is published for any car park here by anybody. These are surface car parks in front of big sheds, which usually means no barrier at all, but nobody states it and we are not going to imply it. If you are driving a van to collect a sofa, that is a judgement to make on arrival.

AccessAble's guide to the Tesco records 26 Blue Badge bays along the front of the store, with more marked at the sides and rear, and a clearly marked passenger drop-off point in front of the entrance with an accessible route to the door. It describes the public car park as being within about 200m of the store.

By bus

The only bus information any operator here publishes is on the leisure park's page, and it is brief: "Buses 6 and 20 give access to Clifton Moor Leisure Park from places such as Rawcliffe, Heworth, Monks Cross and the University of York". For timetables it points at itravelyork.info. 9Yards publishes nothing at all about buses for the retail phases, which given that all four schemes sit within a few hundred yards of each other is a gap rather than a difference.

By train

York Station is the station, and the only guidance anyone gives is "approximately 15 minutes by taxi". That is the leisure park's wording. No walking route, no walking time, no distance and no station-to-park bus link is published by any operator, the rail companies or the council. For a destination three miles from one of the busiest stations in the north of England, that is a poor showing.

Park and ride

Rawcliffe Bar Park and Ride is the site nearest to Clifton Moor and is named on the unofficial guide's getting-here navigation. No operator confirms a link between the park and ride and the shops, and we have not been able to verify a walking route or a connecting service, so treat it as a lead rather than a plan.

By bike

The leisure park publishes 12 cycle spaces between the Vue and the former Frankie & Benny's unit, with more elsewhere on the park. Nothing is published for the three retail phases.

The shops

Because there is no single operator there is no single directory, so what follows is assembled from four separate lists. 9Yards' own list for Phases I and III, read on 10 September 2026, names 22 retailers across 23 units. The other lists come from letting agents and are, as we will show, not always current.

Phases I and III — the 9Yards holding

9Yards describes its York holding as "the dominant out of town retail destination for York and the surrounding area", anchored by DFS, Wren and Currys. The full list of trading names on its own page:

B&Q, Boots, Brewers Decorator Centres, Card Factory, Costa, Currys, DFS, Furniture Village, Greggs, Hays Travel, Home Bargains, IKEA, JD Gyms, McDonald's, Oak Furnitureland, Oxygen Freejumping, Pets at Home, ScS, Sofology, Tesco, The Food Warehouse and Wren Kitchens.

IKEA on that list needs a caveat. 9Yards names IKEA as a York tenant but does not say what format it is — a full store, an order-and-collection point, or a planning studio are three very different things and IKEA operates all of them. We could not establish which this is, so do not drive here expecting a warehouse and a meatball restaurant on the strength of a name on a landlord's page.

Coming soon, per 9Yards: Lidl and Tapi. No opening dates are given for either. And there is a straightforward contradiction here that nobody resolves: the agent marketing Phase II describes an existing Lidl on that park, alongside a McDonald's, with a new Aldi, a Costa and a KFC drive-thru proposed. So either there are two Lidls coming to Clifton Moor, or one of the two pages is wrong. We cannot tell you which.

Phase II — the separately-owned one

Phase II runs to 170,000 sq ft across 12 units and is where the household-goods names are concentrated: Dunelm (37,279 sq ft), Tenpin (33,961 sq ft), B&M (25,000 sq ft), Matalan (20,631 sq ft), plus Iceland, Dreams, Topps Tiles, Tapi, Carpetright, Shoezone, Barker & Stonehouse, Home Bargains and a British Heart Foundation shop. Savills was marketing up to 20,000 sq ft of space there along with a drive-thru or pod opportunity.

The leisure park

Clifton Moor Leisure Park, YO30 4XY, lists Vue, Hungry Horse, Wacky Warehouse, Bella Italia, Caramba Steakhouse York, obliViaR and Pure Padel. Tenpin is over on Phase II and Oxygen is on Phase III, so the leisure offer at Clifton Moor is spread across three of the four schemes rather than concentrated in the one that carries the name.

What has gone, and what that tells you about the listings

Wilko is the clearest example. The letting agent's Phase I page still lists Wilko as an occupier in 2026. Wilko collapsed in 2023 and its stores closed that autumn. 9Yards' own list omits it. That is the single best demonstration we have that the agents' scheme pages for Clifton Moor lag reality by years, and it is why we have leaned on the landlord's own list rather than theirs wherever the two differ.

The Argos unit on Hurricane Way is the other documented change. YorkMix reported on 30 October 2023 that OFJ London, which operates the Oxygen Indoor Activity Parks chain, had applied to City of York Council to convert the long-vacant Argos unit into a trampoline park across the ground floor and an extended mezzanine, the company stating that "The Oxygen Group currently operate 12 parks across the UK and are looking to expand into new locations." The same report noted that plans to move Go Outdoors from Foss Bank into that unit appeared to have been dropped, with a Go Outdoors spokesperson confirming a relocation but declining to say where. Oxygen now appears on both the landlord's and the agent's tenant lists, so the conversion clearly went ahead — but no opening date has ever been published.

A longer view of the churn, without dates. When Phase III changed hands in September 2010, the sale particulars named its tenants as Toys R Us, Comet, JJB Sports, Mothercare, McDonald's, Argos, Currys and Maplin. Every one of those chains except McDonald's and Currys has since disappeared from British retail parks. There are no site-specific closure dates for any of them and we are not implying any — all this proves is that they were trading here in September 2010 and appear on no current list. It is still the most vivid single illustration of what fifteen years has done to a bulky-goods park.

Wickes was demolished rather than lost. The 2014-15 redevelopment took down the old Wickes unit and the retailer relocated; a Wickes still trades at Clifton Moor today.

Useful to know

The Sunday cut-off

Both anchors shut at 4pm on Sunday. Tesco opens at 6am the rest of the week and its petrol station never closes, so early weekday mornings are the quiet, easy window. Tesco's own published quieter times for this store are Wednesday and Saturday from 9am to 10am.

Accessibility at the Tesco — the best-documented building here

AccessAble has a full guide to Tesco York Extra, with its features tested in November 2021. It records an accessible toilet on the ground floor about 18 metres from the entrance with a right-side transfer, a second by the first-floor café with a left-side transfer, both with sensor flushes and grab rails, and a public lift to both floors about 50 metres inside the main entrance with visual indicators and audible announcements. Fixed hearing loops were tested and working at the customer service counter, the pharmacy counter, staffed checkout number four and the café. Tesco's own page adds wheelchair access, automatic doors and a defibrillator.

There is no Changing Places facility at the Tesco, and none is published anywhere at Clifton Moor by any of the four schemes. If you need one, plan around that.

Toilets, Wi-Fi and what the supermarket ends up doing

The leisure park's own wording is that toilets are available at most outlets, for customers' use — which is to say there are no park toilets, only tenants'. It also mentions free Wi-Fi at selected outlets, naming Bella Italia. Nothing equivalent is published for the three retail phases. The Tesco, meanwhile, carries a pharmacy, café, Costa, YO Sushi, an ATM, Coinstar, a photo booth and passport service, Scan as You Shop, a travel money bureau, battery and soft-plastic recycling and a foodbank collection point. On a site with no shopping-centre services of its own, the supermarket does that job by default.

Things nobody publishes

There is no gift card, no lost property arrangement, no dogs policy, no prayer or quiet room, no Shopmobility scheme and no centre management telephone number for Clifton Moor. This is not us failing to find them; it is the consequence of a destination with four landlords and no mall. If something in that list decides your trip, your only route is to ring the individual shop.

Do not go to Vangarde by mistake

Monks Cross Shopping Park and Vangarde Shopping Park are a separate cluster at Huntington, on the other side of York, with their own postcodes, YO32 9GX and YO32 9AE. They have nothing to do with Clifton Moor beyond both being off the same ring road. The cinema at Clifton Moor is the Vue; the Odeon is at Vangarde. Even the Clifton Moor landlord's own page refers to an "Odeon nearby", which is the Vangarde one — the confusion runs deep enough that the owner writes it into its own marketing.

If Clifton Moor is not what you want

For a proper fashion offer rather than sofas and sheds, York Designer Outlet is on the other side of the city at Fulford and is a completely different proposition. Further afield in Yorkshire, White Rose at Leeds is the nearest big enclosed mall of the kind Clifton Moor conspicuously is not, and Crown Point Shopping Park in central Leeds is the closest comparable big-format park you can reach on foot from a station — which, given the fifteen-minute taxi from York Station to Clifton Moor, is a real point of difference.

How it got here

An aerodrome, which is why the streets are named after aeroplanes

Look at the addresses — Hurricane Way, Auster Road, Seafire Close, James Nicolson Link — and at one of the restaurants, Flying Legends, and the history writes itself. The City of York Council's character-area statement for Clifton Moor records that "In the early 1930s York Municipal Aerodrome opened on Clifton Moor complete with clubhouse and hangar." The airfield was requisitioned and expanded during the Second World War and closed shortly afterwards, in the mid-1950s. Before any of that the ground was part of the Royal Forest of Galtres, and the same document notes Roman military training camps here that it describes as of national significance.

The retail park, dated only to a decade

No opening year for Clifton Moor is published by anyone. The council's statement, published in November 2013, gets closest: "Rapid growth of the area as a commercial district began in the 1980s. Clifton Moor Retail Park and trading estate was established at this time." A commercial listing gives a year built of 1984 for the Phase II buildings, but that is a listings field rather than an operator statement and we will not turn it into an opening date for the scheme. The History of York's own account places the retail parks in their 1990s context: "New retail parks at Clifton Moor and Monks Cross, complete with free parking, offered major competition to city centre stores." That competition, and the council's characterisation of the place as a local and sub-regional centre with little to offer visitors, is the whole story of what Clifton Moor is for. Scarborough Group International lists the park among its own past developments, describing it only as an out-of-town retail park development on a 4.5 acre site, with no date and no tenants.

The 2014-15 rebuild

The most substantial documented change came under British Land. Its architect, The Harris Partnership, reported in January 2014 that the scheme had secured planning consent with works expected on site in early October. The project demolished the former Wickes unit, which relocated, and built 70,000 sq ft of new bulky-goods retail including 25,000 sq ft of mezzanine for five new retailers, alongside a refurbishment of the adjacent terrace and new signage. The practice, which worked with Vector on the scheme, put it this way: "Alongside Vector we have been working with our client British Land for many years and we have made future proofing retail parks a forefront of our design philosophy."

Ownership: four transactions and one missing link

January 2017. British Land sold what it called Clifton Moor Shopping Centre to BMO Real Estate Partners, in a £191m package alongside a flagship Debenhams in Manchester and Westgate Retail Park in Wakefield, the deal "structured via the sale of their respective corporate holding vehicles". No price was published for Clifton Moor on its own, and dividing £191m by three would be arithmetic, not reporting.

January 2022. CoStar reported on 27 January that Melford Capital had bought the first phase from Capreon, the Noé family's property company, for £32.75m. The body of that report is behind a subscription, so no size, yield or tenant detail came with it. How the park travelled from BMO in 2017 to Capreon by 2022 has not been reported by anyone. In June 2022 Melford bought Phase III as well, from clients of CBRE Investment Management, with xprop advising. No price was published.

Today. Both phases are presented together as "9Yards York" on 9Yards' own website — around 275,000 sq ft, 23 units, anchored by DFS, Wren and Currys. 9Yards describes itself as "not a passive investor", focused on "owning a limited number of strategically important parks, in which it can continually invest", with backing from what it calls leading university endowments, foundations and family offices, and a portfolio of thirteen parks from Dunfermline to Taplow. What we cannot tell you is the precise legal relationship between 9Yards and Melford Capital. The same letting agent gives the Phase I owner as "9YARDS - Melford Advise" on one page and the Phase III owner as "Melford Capital" on another. No ownership entity is named, no percentage is published, and Melford's own asset-management page returned a 403 and could not be read.

Phase II, which has a different story entirely

Phase II was never part of any of that. In September 2010, Orchard Street Investment Management LLP described itself as the owner when it let 10,000 sq ft there to Peacocks, its asset manager Andrew Jenkins saying the retailer had "endorsed the trading potential of the scheme by snapping up the only vacancy" — the first at the park since 2006. In the same month, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership sold a 144,300 sq ft Clifton Moor park to the West Midlands Metropolitan Authority Pension Fund, via ING clients, for £37.66m at a 5.59% net initial yield, rents running £21 to £26 per sq ft. Neither trail leads anywhere after 2010. Who owns Phase II in 2026 is not published, and it is the largest single unresolved fact about Clifton Moor.