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Retail news · September 2026

Dobbies is closing its Antrim garden centre: your gift card, Club Plus and plant guarantee all point to Lisburn now

Dobbies is closing the Antrim garden centre it opened only three years ago, because Frasers Group bought the retail park underneath it. The company is solvent and nothing you hold is being cancelled — but the gift card, the Lifetime Plant Guarantee, the Club Plus hot drinks and the Christmas bookings are all written to be redeemed in a store, and after October the nearest one is Lisburn, 17.5 miles away.

Published 5 September 2026 · Followed up 5 September 2026 · Shopbam reports what other outlets and company filings recorded; we did not attend or audit anything ourselves.

A garden centre with a closing notice, a gift card and a potted plant beside a signpost pointing 17.5 miles to Lisburn

Dobbies Antrim: the numbers that affect shoppers

FigureValueWhat it means
Closing date Mid October or end of October 2026 Dobbies' own Antrim store page says "We're closing by mid October". Retail Gazette, the Irish News, the News Letter and the Antrim Guardian all say the end of October. Plan around the earlier date.
Distance to the nearest other Dobbies 17.5 miles Antrim to Lisburn, about 23 minutes by car (Rome2rio). That is town to town — both garden centres are out of town, so allow more.
By public transport About 57 minutes Direct Translink bus, Antrim Buscentre to Lisburn train station, roughly every three hours (Rome2rio). Again, town centre to town centre.
Dobbies stores left in Northern Ireland 1 The store locator lists 41 UK stores, only two of them in Northern Ireland. Lisburn, opened September 2010 on an £8m investment, becomes the only one.
Store size 110,000 sq ft A £10m build that opened in October 2023 and was the largest Dobbies in the UK at the time (Irish News for the size and cost, Retail Gazette and RLI for "largest").
Jobs affected About 120, or "over 40" The Irish News reported about 120 full- and part-time staff; Retail Gazette said over 40. No Dobbies statement we found gives a figure.
Gift card expiry (e-gift card) 24 months from purchase Dobbies e-gift card page. It is also non-refundable and cannot be returned.
Where a gift card cannot be spent Online, and in any in-store concession The e-gift card page says it is redeemable in any Dobbies store but "cannot be used to purchase products online or in any of the in-store concessions". Antrim has 11 concessions.
Dobbies Club Plus £16.50 a year A £15 figure also appears on the same Dobbies page. It auto-renews unless you tell them before the renewal date, or within 14 days of the first payment.
Club Plus hot drink credits 2 a month Redeemable "against applicable regular hot drinks at any Dobbies restaurant" — a Dobbies restaurant, not a third-party one. From November, that means the Lisburn restaurant.
Lifetime Plant Guarantee claims In store only You bring "your plant into your nearest store, along with your proof of purchase and your plant label". There is no postal or online route published.
Concessions inside the Antrim store 11 Named on the store page. Your Dobbies gift card does not work in any of them, at Antrim or anywhere else.

What happened

Dobbies is closing its Antrim garden centre in October 2026, three years after opening it. The store sits at The Junction Retail and Leisure Park, 111 Ballymena Road, Antrim BT41 4LL. It opened in October 2023 at 110,000 sq ft on a £10m build, and was the largest Dobbies in the UK at the time.

The reason it is closing has nothing to do with how it trades. On 4 June 2026 Frasers Group announced it had bought The Junction, along with The Boulevard at Banbridge, from Lotus Property, which had owned both since 2016. The price was not disclosed. Frasers then issued notice to redevelop the park for "new retail and leisure uses", and Dobbies is one of the tenants going.

Dobbies says the decision "relates specifically to the Antrim site and does not reflect Dobbies' wider business performance". It points to £6m invested across the estate in the past year, and says it will now invest in Lisburn's restaurant, facilities, product range and customer experience.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. This is not an administration and not a restructuring plan. Dobbies is solvent and carries on trading, so nothing you hold is being written off. But the company runs 41 UK stores and only two of them are in Northern Ireland. When Antrim goes, Lisburn is the only Dobbies in the province — and almost every benefit a Dobbies customer holds is written to be used inside a store.

Two closing dates, and we would trust the earlier one

Dobbies' own Antrim store page carries a banner reading "We're closing by mid October", along with a closing down sale notice. Retail Gazette, the Irish News, the News Letter and the Antrim Guardian all report the end of October. That is a real disagreement and we have not resolved it, but the retailer's own website is the one telling shoppers the earlier date, and it is the one that knows. If you have something to spend, claim or collect, work to mid October.

The job numbers do not agree either. The Irish News reported about 120 full- and part-time staff; Retail Gazette said over 40. No Dobbies statement we found puts a number on it. Both are shown here attributed rather than averaged.

The gift card is the sharpest problem, because it cannot go online

The usual advice when a shop closes is to spend the card on the website. That does not work here. Dobbies' e-gift card page says the card is "redeemable in any Dobbies store towards thousands of items" but "cannot be used to purchase products online or in any of the in-store concessions". It is valid for 24 months from the date of purchase, and it "cannot be returned" — non-refundable.

So an Antrim card is a store card, and after October the store that will take it is Lisburn. The concession exclusion bites harder than usual at Antrim, because the store page names 11 concessions inside it: Johnsons Garden Buildings & Hot Tubs, Weird Fish, TIGI & VIZ-A-VIZ, Horwood Homewares, Regatta Great Outdoors, Craghoppers, Raging Bull, Menarys Luggage, Klass, Tog24 and Life Well Lived. If you were planning to burn the balance on a coat or a hot tub in the closing down sale, check at the till whose stock it is first.

The physical cards are less clear. The champagne, lavender and garden shed card pages confirm only that the card cannot be used in the in-store concessions and is non-refundable. They state no expiry and say nothing about online use, and the full gift card terms document would not open for us. We are not going to assume the 24-month clock and the online exclusion apply to a physical card just because they apply to the e-gift card, so if you hold a physical one, treat the store rule as the safe assumption and ask about the expiry.

The Lifetime Plant Guarantee survives, but only if you can get to a store

Dobbies' Lifetime Plant Guarantee covers all hardy garden plants "for your lifetime". If a plant "fails to establish", Dobbies will replace it free or refund it. It is conditional on following the planting and care instructions, and "extreme climatic conditions may invalidate this guarantee". It also does not affect or alter your statutory rights.

The catch is the claim route. The guarantee says you claim by bringing "your plant into your nearest store, along with your proof of purchase and your plant label". There is no postal or online alternative published. A guarantee that lasts your lifetime but is redeemed in person is worth a lot less when the store is 17.5 miles further away, and it is the single strongest reason to keep receipts and plant labels for anything you have bought at Antrim.

Club Plus, the hot drinks and the auto-renewal

Dobbies Club Plus costs £16.50 a year, though a £15 figure also appears on the same Dobbies page — we have not been able to reconcile the two. It includes two hot drink credits a month "against applicable regular hot drinks at any Dobbies restaurant", 10 per cent off plants, bulbs and seeds, two points per £1, priority event booking and a birthday treat. The hot drink credits are explicitly for a Dobbies restaurant, not a third-party one.

Membership runs a year from purchase and auto-renews unless you notify Dobbies before the renewal date, or within 14 days of your first payment. You can cancel at any time; the benefits run to the end of the year you have paid for, and the membership then converts to the free Dobbies Club.

The terms say nothing at all about a store closing. There is no clause covering a member whose local store shuts, which means there is no published entitlement to a refund, a credit or an extension. If your two monthly coffees were the reason you paid, the honest position is that after October you can only take them in Lisburn — and that the auto-renewal will happen on schedule unless you stop it yourself.

Events and Christmas: the location is the one thing you cannot change

Dobbies' events terms are clearer than most. "Book with Confidence gives you reassurance of a full refund if the event needs to be cancelled", and you get a full refund if you cancel three or more days before. You can change the date through the link in your confirmation email. But the key line is this: "The location of a booked event can't be changed. The original event would need to be cancelled and new booking made", subject to availability.

So a booking held at Antrim cannot simply be moved to Lisburn. It has to be cancelled and rebooked, and rebooking depends on there still being space. Dobbies' events site does list the full 2026 Christmas programme for Lisburn — Santa's Grotto, Santa's Breakfast, Santa Paws, Santa's Quiet Grotto and the Festive Wreath Making Workshop. For a sense of what those cost, Antrim's 2025 prices were a grotto from £14 a child, Santa's Breakfast from £18 a child and £9 an adult, Santa Paws £12.50 a dog, wreath making with afternoon tea £55 a head, Santa's Arrival free and a Christmas Shopping Night on a pay-what-you-can basis at £1, £2.50 or £5. Those are last year's Antrim prices, not this year's Lisburn ones.

We could not establish whether Antrim ever opened 2026 Christmas bookings at all. The events site would not list venues other than the one already selected, so if you think you hold an Antrim booking, ring customer services on 0131 561 6406 rather than waiting for an email.

Buying in the closing down sale

A closing down sale does not remove your rights over faulty goods. Section 22 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives a short-term right to reject faulty goods within 30 days — with the qualification, which matters in a garden centre, that section 22(4) allows a shorter window for goods "of a kind that can reasonably be expected to perish after a shorter period". A tray of bedding plants is not a bookcase.

What you do not get is a change-of-mind right. As Citizens Advice puts it, "You don't have an automatic right to get your money back if you just change your mind" when you buy in a shop. That is the retailer's own policy, and shops routinely tighten it on sale stock. Read whatever the Antrim tills are displaying about the sale before you buy something large.

How it unfolded

DateWhat happened
September 2010Dobbies opens at Lisburn, an £8m investment.
2016Lotus Property buys The Junction in Antrim and The Boulevard in Banbridge.
October 2023Dobbies opens at The Junction, Antrim — 110,000 sq ft, a £10m build and the largest Dobbies in the UK at the time.
2024A Dobbies restructuring plan closes 17 stores. Antrim is not one of them.
4 June 2026Frasers Group announces it has bought The Junction and The Boulevard from Lotus Property. The price is not disclosed.
2026Frasers issues notice to redevelop the park for "new retail and leisure uses". Dobbies says the decision "relates specifically to the Antrim site".
Mid to end October 2026The Antrim store closes. Dobbies' own site says by mid October; the press reports say the end of the month.
November and December 2026The 2026 Christmas programme — grotto, Santa's Breakfast, Santa Paws, wreath making — runs at Lisburn.

What this means if you shop there

  • Spend the gift card before mid October, or accept a trip to Lisburn. It cannot be used online and it cannot be used in the concessions, so there is no escape route from the store rule. The e-gift card expires 24 months from purchase and is non-refundable. Nothing is being cancelled — Dobbies is solvent — but the card only works where there is a Dobbies.
  • Check whose till you are at. Eleven concessions trade inside the Antrim store. Your card is refused in all of them, and we could not establish whether their stock is even part of the Dobbies closing down sale or whether they clear it themselves.
  • Keep every plant receipt and plant label. The Lifetime Plant Guarantee is claimed in person at your nearest store with proof of purchase and the label. After October your nearest store is Lisburn, 17.5 miles and about 23 minutes away by car, or roughly 57 minutes by a bus that runs about every three hours.
  • Decide about Club Plus now, not at renewal. It auto-renews unless you tell Dobbies before the renewal date. The two hot drink credits a month only work in a Dobbies restaurant, and from November the nearest one is in Lisburn. The terms say nothing about a store closing, so there is no published right to a refund or an extension — you would have to ask.
  • An Antrim event booking has to be cancelled and rebooked, not moved. Dobbies' terms say the location of a booked event can't be changed. Cancel three or more days ahead for a full refund, then rebook at Lisburn if there is space. Customer services: 0131 561 6406.
  • Faulty goods rights survive the sale; change-of-mind returns may not. The 30-day right to reject applies to clearance stock, shortened for things that perish. A refund because you changed your mind was always the shop's own policy, and closing shops tighten those.
  • We could not confirm whether Lisburn will take an Antrim return. Dobbies' refunds and returns page would not render its policy for us on any attempt. If you are holding something you might take back, do it at Antrim while Antrim is open.

Checked on 5 September 2026. A story this recent moves — we update this box rather than leaving it to rot.

Where this came from

What we could not check

  • Whether an Antrim purchase can be returned or exchanged at Lisburn, and for how long. Dobbies' refunds and returns page fetches but its policy body never rendered on any attempt — we saw the header, navigation and footer and nothing else.
  • Whether Club Plus members whose local store has closed are offered a refund, a credit or an extension. The membership terms say nothing about a store closing and Dobbies has published nothing on it.
  • Whether physical Dobbies gift cards share the e-gift card's 24-month expiry and its online exclusion. The individual card pages state only the concession exclusion and that they are non-refundable, and the full gift card terms document would not open.
  • Whether Antrim ever opened 2026 Christmas bookings. The events site would not list any venue other than the one already selected, so we could not check.
  • Whether the concessions' stock is part of the Dobbies closing down sale or whether each concession runs its own clearance, and whether any of the 11 relocate.
  • What the closing down sale actually discounts. No percentages or categories have been published that we could find.
  • What Frasers Group intends to build at The Junction beyond the phrase "new retail and leisure uses".
  • Whether the Lifetime Plant Guarantee will be honoured at Lisburn on plants bought at Antrim without argument. The guarantee is company-wide and says "your nearest store", but no Dobbies statement addresses the closure specifically.
  • The closing date itself. Dobbies' own store page says by mid October; Retail Gazette, the Irish News, the News Letter and the Antrim Guardian all say the end of October. We have not been able to reconcile them.
  • The number of jobs affected. About 120 (Irish News) against over 40 (Retail Gazette), with no figure in any Dobbies statement.
  • Which Lisburn address is correct. The Dobbies store page gives Strawberry Hill, Saintfield Road, BT27 5PG; Dobbies' own events site gives 56 Saintfield Road, BT27 5BE.
  • Whether Club Plus costs £16.50 or £15 a year. Both figures appear on the same Dobbies page.

Company figures are as reported by the businesses themselves or their administrators. Where two sources disagree, this page says so rather than picking one.