Craigleith Retail Park, Edinburgh: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A free-parking retail park three miles from Princes Street, built in the hole left by the quarry that supplied the stone for the New Town. Two websites use this park's name and we cannot vouch for either of them. Nobody publishes hours for the park as a whole, the free parking has a three-hour limit that no park-branded source mentions, and the railway station it is named after shut in 1962. Here is what is actually on the record.

Last checked 18 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Craigleith Retail Park sits on South Groathill Avenue in Blackhall, about three miles north-west of the centre of Edinburgh, where the A90 Queensferry Road and the A902 Telford Road come together. It opened in 1993. Sainsbury's anchors it, Marks and Spencer sits on it, and the whole thing is built in the bottom of Craigleith Quarry — the hole that produced the stone for Register House, the Dean Bridge and a good deal of the New Town.

Start with the websites, because this is the part that will waste your time. craigleithretailpark.co.uk has a homepage that loads and says the park is "open 7 days a week" — and every page below it was unreachable, because the site's robots.txt could not be negotiated over TLS. craigleithretailpark.com loads perfectly and lists both Homebase and The Range as tenants, which is impossible, since The Range took over the Homebase unit in March 2025. Neither names an owner, a manager or a company number. We are not treating either as the operator's website.

That leaves this page in an unusual position for a park of this size: there are no operator-published opening hours at all. We went to the tenants one at a time and got six out of their own websites — neither anchor among them. The same trawl turned up the most useful thing here, which no park-branded source mentions: the free parking has a three-hour maximum stay and fines are issued, published by PureGym because a gym has to tell its members.

The owner, by contrast, is solid. Craigleith is held by Nuveen Real Estate for the Nuveen UK Retail Warehouse Fund, which names "CRAIGLEITH RETAIL PARK" in its own investor disclosure. Before Nuveen it was Henderson Global Investors, which bought the freehold investment interest for £48m in 2002 and still held it in 2011, and nobody has ever reported a sale between the two. What follows draws on the agents' brochure, the fund's disclosure, the Gazetteer for Scotland, the British Geological Survey, two Canmore records and the local press.

Trespass is a great addition to the tenant mix at Edinburgh's leading in-town retail park, which continues to improve year on year.

The essentials

Opening times

Every time in that table is one shop's own hours, taken from that shop's own website on 18 September 2026. None of it is the park's, because the park does not publish any: there is no operator site with an opening-hours page and no centre-management page, and the single park-branded statement that exists — "open 7 days a week" — is not a set of times. The usual fallback did not work either. When an operator's site fails us we normally go to Next, H&M or Mango, whose store-finder pages are server-rendered and reliable; none of the three is a tenant at Craigleith. So we worked through the tenants who are here: six gave us clean times, and the rest are in the table with the reason they did not.

The awkward part is which two are missing. Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer are the two shops most people want the hours for, and they are exactly the two we could not get from a first-party source. If your trip depends on the supermarket being open, check the Sainsbury's app or ring the store.

Two practical points from the times we do have: Trespass is the outlier, 10am to 6pm every day, so a 9am or a 7pm visit will find it shut while its neighbours trade, and PureGym is open around the clock. Plenty of third-party directories carry times for every shop here and we have not printed any of them. No Christmas, New Year or Scottish public-holiday hours are published by anybody, which matters more in Scotland, where 2 January is a bank holiday.

Getting there

By road

Use EH4 2LN. There is no motorway junction to give you and we are not going to invent one — the nearest motorway is nowhere near this park. Craigleith is an in-town retail park, roughly three miles from Princes Street, and the roads that matter are the A90 Queensferry Road and the A902 Telford Road, which meet at the Blackhall junction beside it. The letting agents' own locational line is simply "3 miles from Edinburgh City Centre", and that is the whole of the published road guidance. Access into the park is from Groathill Avenue, off Telford Road.

Parking — free, but there is a three-hour limit nobody advertises

Parking is free, at surface level, outside the units. It is also limited to three hours, and fines are issued. That limit does not appear on either website carrying the park's name, on the letting brochure, or in any local coverage. It appears on PureGym's own page for its gym here, which tells its members there is free on-site parking "with restrictions (maximum 3-hour stay before fines apply)" — a gym has to say so, because its members stay longer than shoppers do.

Two third parties agree. Parkopedia gives a three-hour maximum, free 8am to 10pm, 500 spaces, disabled bays, a Safer Parking Award, "no height restrictions", customers only, and names GroupNexus Limited as the operator — but it is crowd-sourced, so GroupNexus is its claim rather than a fact. The independent Edinburgh Parking Guide, written by a serving enforcement officer, also lists about three hours, and its advice is the right advice: "Always check the signs on site". On spaces, the Savills brochure says 550 while the Gazetteer and Parkopedia say 500; Specsavers describes "free parking in 550 space Sainsbury's car park", so the two may be counting different car parks. We could confirm neither coach parking nor a taxi rank.

By bus

The park has its own stop, Craigleith Retail Park, on Groathill Road South next to Sainsbury's, and exactly two services call at it: the 13, run by Midland Bluebird rather than Lothian, from the retail park to Blackhall, the West End, Broughton and Lochend; and Lothian's 38, West Granton to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. That is worth knowing before you plan a journey on a Lothian day ticket.

There is a second, different list: Specsavers, for its branch inside the supermarket, gives Lothian 38, 43 and 47 — agreeing on the 38, adding two, and not mentioning the 13. Probably different stops, but nobody reconciles them, so both are printed.

By train — there is no station, and there has not been one since 1962

This catches people out because the name persists on maps and in old directions. Craigleith railway station opened on 1 August 1879 as a Caledonian Railway junction on the Granton branch, where the lines to Leith North and to Barnton diverged from Edinburgh Princes Street. It closed to Barnton passengers on 7 May 1951, to goods on 1 June 1960, and to Granton and Leith North passengers on 30 April 1962. It has not reopened.

In the words of the railway record: "The trackbed is now a footpath. The platforms remain and Queensferry Road still crosses the former line with a bridge." So the walking and cycling route past the park is the old railway, which makes Craigleith easy to reach on foot or by bike from Blackhall, Comely Bank and Stockbridge without touching Queensferry Road. No walking distance to any operational station is published by anyone, and no cycle parking either.

Accessibility

There is no park-level accessibility information at all, because there is no operator site to carry it. We found no AccessAble guide and no Euan's Guide listing — and Euan's Guide is an Edinburgh charity, which makes its absence here more striking than it would be elsewhere. No Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility scheme, no wheelchair hire and no accessible-toilet location is confirmed by any source.

What does exist comes from three tenants: Currys says its store "has a number of extra-wide parking bays"; Specsavers says it is "all on one level, with all of the store, including test room being accessible to all"; Superdrug lists "Accessible" among its services. That is the entire published record. Structurally the park helps — flat, single-level, parking outside each unit — but that is the layout, not published provision.

The shops

There is no readable store directory here, so the list below is assembled tenant by tenant from the agents' scheme listing, the retailers' own store pages and the local press. Our working count is about twenty; ukmalls.co.uk says 23; the agents' own list of sixteen names is out of date, because it still shows both Homebase and Home Store + More.

The anchors

Sainsbury's, with a café and its own petrol station, is the reason the park exists — it bought the quarry site in 1992. Sainsbury's calls the store Blackhall, not Craigleith, which is worth knowing when you search for it. Marks and Spencer is the other big name here.

The rest of the park

Boots, TK Maxx (unit 32, in The Quarry extension), Currys (unit 16), The Range (unit 36), Lidl (unit 15), Pets at Home with The Groom Room and Vets4Pets, Superdrug (unit 7C), Card Factory, Nike, Trespass (unit 12B), PureGym (units 13–14), Specsavers inside the Sainsbury's and Bensons for Beds (unit 7a&b), plus Starbucks, Costa and KFC, and a webuyanycar.com pod.

Nike is the odd one out — a sports brand store on a park this size is unusual, and a leftover from the fashion-led repositioning that followed the 2002 change of ownership. No dated source says when it arrived. Unit 11, 3,549 sq ft, was showing as under offer when we checked; the incoming tenant is not named.

What has arrived, with dates

• Trespass — July 2011, 3,075 sq ft, the last unit in the phase-two extension; letting it made the park fully let for the first time.
• Bensons for Beds — opened 1 September 2023, 4,500 sq ft, unit 7a&b, five staff, per the North Edinburgh News of 25 August 2023.
• The Range — opened 21 March 2025 in the former Homebase unit, part of CDS Superstores' acquisition of Homebase stores, per the Edinburgh Evening News of 13 March 2025. Alex Simpkin, Chief Executive of CDS Superstores, said the company was "focused on ensuring a seamless transfer of these locations into our new store format, with fifteen launches confirmed for this year so far."
• The Range, again — refitted and reopened a year later, reported on 3 April 2026 with expanded home décor, arts and crafts and furniture departments and a dedicated "Garden Centre by Homebase" inside it. The Homebase name survives here as a concession within its own replacement.
• Specsavers — the branch inside the Sainsbury's had a £30,000 refit reported on 20 April 2025; it is the only dedicated opticians on the park.

What has gone

Home Store + More closed at the end of May 2025, and that is the one departure anybody dated. The Edinburgh Evening News reported it on 18 April 2025; the Craigleith store went at the same time as East Kilbride. The company announced it on Facebook — "our stores will remain open until the end of May. Shop at least 50% off everything in-store now" — and gave no reason, declining to respond when the paper asked. No job numbers were published, and nobody publishes what took the unit, or whether anything has.

Everything else is undated. In 2011 the tenant mix included NEXT, New Look, Wallis and Mamas & Papas; Argos and Clarks appear in other listings; Homebase was here until the chain collapsed nationally. All have gone and no departure date is published for any of them. Lidl, in unit 15, is the mirror image: the only dated public step is a public information day on a proposed Lidl store, reported on 14 February 2020, and no opening date is published.

Useful to know

The Stone Alphabet — the best thing here, and almost nobody looks at it

Beside the car park there is a curved sandstone wall carrying twenty-six carved abstract stone forms: a 1993 work called the Stone Alphabet by the artist James Ritchie, the stones sourced from eighteen different countries. Historic Environment Scotland's Canmore record describes them in its own words as forming "a symbolic alphabet, reminding of progress made in communication, science and art."

The wall is carved with the words CRAIGLEITH QUARRY J SAINSBURY and, on a supporting wall, the Roman numerals MCMXCIII — 1993. It was recorded in the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association's national survey in 1997. It is a signed, dated, nationally recorded piece of public sculpture in a supermarket car park, and no shop, sign or website on the site tells you it is there.

The rock face behind Sainsbury's

A section of the old quarry face survives behind the supermarket and has been a Local Geodiversity Site since 1999. The Gazetteer for Scotland describes what is visible: "ancient mud-cracks, cross-bedding...fossil burrows, limestone bands" and oil-shale — 350-million-year-old Carboniferous sandstone, the same rock that faces half the New Town.

Things nobody publishes

Remember the three hours: the free parking is limited and fines are issued, and the limit is published by a gym rather than by the landlord. Beyond that we could find no published information at all on toilets, baby changing, a Changing Places toilet, cash machines, free Wi-Fi, lost property, a quiet hour, a dogs policy, Shopmobility, wheelchair hire, a prayer room, gift cards, a customer-services desk, coach parking or a taxi rank. The reason is structural: there is no operator website, so there is nothing to publish them on. That does not mean none of these exist — a park with a superstore, an M&S and a KFC will have toilets and cash machines. It means nobody states it. The one facility a park-branded source does claim is a play park for children.

A park inside a neighbourhood

In January 2023 the local MSP Angus Robertson and Councillor Vicky Nicolson publicly asked the retailers here to deal with trolleys abandoned in the surrounding green space, suggesting wheel-locking or an active collection programme. It is the only dated instance we found of this park and its neighbours publicly disagreeing about anything, and it tells you how tightly the site sits inside a residential area. Edinburgh's Low Emission Zone, incidentally, covers the city centre; we believe this park is outside it, but we did not verify the boundary against this postcode.

The other Edinburgh parks

Craigleith is the in-town one. For the big out-of-town formats, Fort Kinnaird is on the eastern edge of the city, Hermiston Gait Retail Park and The Gyle Shopping Centre are out west by the bypass, Straiton Retail Park is south at Loanhead, and Ocean Terminal is down at Leith. Craigleith is smaller than all of them and closer to the middle of the city than any of them.

How it got here

The quarry, 1615 to 1942

Craigleith Quarry worked for 327 years. The British Geological Survey's account, drawn from McMillan, Gillanders and Fairhurst's Building stones of Edinburgh, dates the start precisely: "The first records of the use of Craigleith stone are in the Accounts of the Masters of Works. In January 1615, quarriers were paid at the quarry." And the end: "All work is assumed to have stopped finally in 1941-2."

What came out of it was "liver rock" — in the BGS's words, "the very hard, fine-grained, cream-coloured, compact sandstone... used for the fronts of the best houses and public buildings." That means Register House, the Dean Bridge, the National Monument on Calton Hill, the University of Edinburgh's Old College, the City Chambers, Parliament Square, the Tron Kirk, work at Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace, Leith Docks, and Georgian townhouses across the New Town. If you have admired the stonework in central Edinburgh, you have admired the hole this retail park is built in.

The depth is disputed within a single source. The BGS page records that "at one time the quarry face at Craigleith was said to have been 110 m deep" — hedged, as you can see — and separately that it was "61 m (200 feet) deep and covered 7 acres" in 1892. The Gazetteer for Scotland prints 110 m flat.

The Scotsman's Lost Edinburgh account by David McLean, published on 22 April 2014, gives the scale: "At its peak it was the largest and most productive of the city's eight district quarries, with over a hundred workers generating up to sixty cartloads of stone at least four times a day." It also gives the cost. Of the stone dust the quarriers breathed, the saying recorded there is: "An old Craigleith man was done at 30 and died at 35." Between 1826 and 1873 the quarry produced fossilised Carboniferous trees, some thirty-six feet long; one still stands outside the glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Garden in Inverleith.

What happened to the hole

After quarrying stopped the pit became a cooling-water reservoir for a gas manufacturing plant, and then the city's principal refuse dump, until it reached capacity around 1980. A little over a decade of nothing much followed before Sainsbury's plc purchased the site in 1992 and began work on a new superstore, in the BGS's words. The park opened in 1993, the Sainsbury's designed by Reiach and Hall Architects, with what one architectural description calls rectilinear towers marking the shop entrances.

The ownership chain

Henderson Global Investors purchased the freehold investment interest in Craigleith Retail Park for £48m — that is the published wording — in 2002, after which, the Gazetteer notes, the emphasis shifted towards fashion retailers: the NEXT, New Look, Wallis and Nike of the 2000s. Henderson was still the owner in July 2011, when Cushman & Wakefield and Savills were letting the last unit of the phase-two extension on its behalf.

By February 2020 the leasing brochure names Nuveen Real Estate, and Completely Retail files the scheme under a Nuveen portfolio today. The Nuveen UK Retail Warehouse Fund — launched in July 2001, thirteen direct property assets, a net asset value of £409.6m at the year-end covered by its disclosure — lists "CRAIGLEITH RETAIL PARK" among its largest direct investments, in a lot-size band of £65m to £75m, with the portfolio percentage marked undisclosed "as requested by Nuveen Real Estate". That band is a size category, not a price paid.

The step between Henderson and Nuveen is not on the public record as far as we could establish, and no sale has ever been reported, so we are giving you the two fixed points and the gap rather than a narrative we cannot evidence. One correction while we are here: this park has been described elsewhere as held by an Aviva or a Standard Life fund, and we found nothing whatever to support that.

One oddity to finish on. Historic Environment Scotland holds two entries for this site: Canmore 302136, for the retail park, is a proper record with a classification and a full description of the Stone Alphabet, while Canmore 68455, for the quarry, offers "Sandstone Quarry (Period Unassigned)", a grid reference and a cross-reference to a bronze sword found there — and nothing else. The national record has more to say about the shopping park than about the 327-year-old quarry underneath it.