Fosse Park, Leicester: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

Fosse Park keeps unusual hours — it stays open until 9pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, an hour later than it does on a Saturday. That is the single most useful thing to know before you set off, and it is the opposite of what most people assume. Here is the rest: the shops, the free parking, what the operator publishes about getting there, and the several places where the published numbers do not agree with each other.

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

Fosse Park sits at Enderby, on the south-western edge of Leicester in the district of Blaby, and it is one of the biggest out-of-town retail parks in the East Midlands. The postcode is LE19 1HY, the phone number is 0116 263 0603, and the operator's own site is fossepark.co.uk, which we checked and found live and genuine on 5 September 2026.

Start with the opening times, because they are strange in a way that catches people out. Fosse Park closes at 8pm on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday — but at 9pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Midweek runs later than the weekend. If you have been putting off a Saturday trip because you assume you have all evening, you have an hour less than you think; if you can go on a Thursday, you have an hour more.

The second thing to know is a relief rather than a warning. Fosse Park is marketed as four places — Fosse Park North, Fosse Park South, Fosse Park West and Food Central — and on a lot of retail parks that arrangement is a trap, because the sections turn out to be separately owned schemes whose store counts and parking figures get quietly added together. Not here. All four are named sections of a single asset owned by The Crown Estate, so when you see a combined figure for shops or spaces, it is a legitimate one. The genuinely separate neighbour is Everards Meadows, across Soar Valley Way (the A563), which was commissioned by Everards Brewery and is nothing to do with Fosse Park. We have left it out of every number on this page.

The third thing is that the size figures do not add up, and we are printing all of them anyway. Fosse Park is described today as 758,500 sq ft. In 2014 it was described as 560,000 sq ft. The extension that opened in 2021 was billed at 140,000 sq ft. Those three numbers cannot all be right at once, nobody reconciles them, and we would rather show you the problem than pick a favourite.

What follows is drawn from the operator's own pages, its FAQ and its Plan Your Visit directions, its leasing brochure, CompletelyRetail, Visit Blaby, trade press coverage of the 2014 sale and the 2019 extension, and tenant announcements. Where two sources disagree we have printed both with their sources. Where nobody publishes something — and there is a fair amount of that, particularly around car park height limits and the nearest railway station — we say so.

Junction 21 off the M1. Join the A5460

The essentials

Opening times

Checked 5 September 2026, and unusually for a retail park these came straight off the operator's own pages in readable form. We did not have to reconstruct them from tenants or tourism directories, which is worth saying because on a lot of parks that is exactly what has to happen.

The shape is the thing to notice. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday run to 9pm; Monday, Tuesday and Saturday stop at 8pm. Most people expect Saturday to be the longest day of the week and it is not. If you are coming after work, midweek gives you the most time; if you are coming on a Saturday afternoon, do not assume you have until nine.

What is missing is the holiday calendar. The operator publishes a general bank holiday time of 10am to 6pm, but no specific hours for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day or Easter. Those are precisely the days when a wasted journey stings most, and they are precisely the days nobody has published. Ring 0116 263 0603 before travelling over any holiday period.

Individual shops keep their own hours within the park's, and the food and drink units in Food Central are not necessarily tied to the retail closing time. If one particular shop is the whole reason for your trip, check that shop.

Getting there

By road

Junction 21 of the M1, then the A5460. We are printing that junction number because the operator itself publishes it — the wording on Fosse Park's own Plan Your Visit page is "Junction 21 off the M1. Join the A5460". That is a rare thing on this site. Most retail park operators publish no junction at all, and where they do not, we give the postcode and say so rather than guess.

For the same reason, you will not find any other road named here. Fosse Park sits in a part of Leicestershire threaded with motorways and trunk roads, and other routes in are certainly possible, but the operator names only the M1 and the A5460 and we are not going to add to its list. If you are coming from a direction where Junction 21 is not the obvious approach, set your satnav to LE19 1HY and let it work the rest out.

One local landmark worth having in mind: Soar Valley Way, the A563, separates Fosse Park from Everards Meadows. They are different places with different owners. If you have crossed a dual carriageway to get to where you are, you may have crossed to the wrong one.

Parking

There are 3,100 free spaces, and the operator publishes no general time limit and no overnight parking. For a park of this size that is a generous arrangement, and it is one of the reasons Fosse Park is used as a half-day destination rather than a dash.

The exception is the McDonald's car park, which has a 90-minute limit enforced by ANPR cameras. This is the classic way to collect a charge notice through the post three weeks after a perfectly innocent afternoon: you park at the McDonald's because there is a space, you then walk off into the park for two hours, and the camera has no idea you bought anything. If you are staying to shop, park in the main car parks.

There are 89 Blue Badge bays across the park, and it holds a Park Mark safer parking award. No height restriction is published for any part of the car park by anyone — not the operator, not any third-party listing we checked. The car parks are surface level, so a barrier would be unusual, but that is reasoning, not a published fact, and we are not going to print a figure that does not exist.

By train

We cannot honestly give you a station. Neither the operator nor Blaby District Council names a nearest railway station for Fosse Park, and no source publishes a walking route, a distance or a journey time from any station to the park. Online journey planners will offer you Narborough, but that is a routing engine's suggestion rather than anybody's published advice, there is no confirmed walking route to go with it, and we are not prepared to send you to a station on that basis.

If you want to come by rail, plan the last leg yourself with a live journey planner on the day, or ring the park on 0116 263 0603 and ask. This is a genuine gap in what is published about a park that takes more than thirteen million visits a year.

By bus and by bike

The 2021 extension was built with 172 cycle spaces, which is a substantial provision and the clearest signal that arriving by bike is expected rather than tolerated. Beyond that, we could not confirm bus route numbers, a taxi rank or coach parking from any source we would be willing to cite.

Accessibility and facilities

Modern Mobility is the mobility desk, next to Primark in Fosse Park North, open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 5pm on 0116 263 0600. What the operator does not publish is what it costs, whether you need to book, or exactly what equipment it holds — so if you need it, ring first, and note that it is closed on Sundays even though the park is open.

There is a Changing Places toilet, along with baby change and standard toilets, on the second floor of Food Central. That is a specific and genuinely useful location to have in advance, because Food Central is a distinct building rather than somewhere you pass through by accident.

Cash machines are at Marks & Spencer and outside Boots. There are 89 Blue Badge bays. We could not confirm lockers, a taxi rank or coach parking.

Dogs

Dogs are welcome in the outdoor areas of the park and inside the Volpo Lounge. They are not allowed in Food Central. That is a clear and slightly unusual split — the food hall is out, the bar-restaurant is in — so it is worth knowing which building you are heading for before you set off with the dog in the back.

The shops

The published counts are 53 units (CompletelyRetail) and "approximately 50 major brands" (Visit Blaby). The operator does not publish a headline number of its own that we could find. Those two are probably the same park measured in slightly different ways — units against brands — but we have printed both rather than quietly settling on one.

The anchors are the names you would expect on a park of this scale: Marks & Spencer and Primark among them, with a spread of fashion, homeware and food and drink across the four sections.

What has arrived, with dates

• Karen Millen — 14 August 2026. The best story on the park right now. Fosse Park was one of only three sites chosen for the brand's UK launch, alongside Aberdeen's Union Square and Liverpool One. For an out-of-town retail park in the East Midlands to be picked as a launch site next to two of the biggest city-centre schemes in the country tells you something about how Fosse Park trades.
• Moss — February 2026. The menswear and formalwear business took appointments here from February 2026.
• TFG London — September 2025. Not one shop but four brands in one: Phase Eight, Hobbs, Whistles and Inside Story under a single roof, with a bar inside the store. If you are looking for any of those four names on a shop front, it is the one unit you want.
• Marks & Spencer — May 2024. An 11,500 sq ft extension took the store past 100,000 sq ft, described at the time as the retailer's biggest single store renewal investment to date. That is a serious vote of confidence in a single location.
• Schuh — August 2023, following a set of lettings signed in July 2023 that also brought in Dreams, Designer Sofas and Natuzzi. The last two were new to Leicester altogether.

What is coming

Two brands are due to open in Fosse Park West in time for Christmas 2026, and neither has been named. Unit 3 was subdivided into two from 20 April 2026 to make room for them. If you visit in the autumn and find hoardings in the West section, that is what is behind them. We would rather tell you that two unnamed tenants are coming than pretend we know who they are.

What has closed — and why this section is short

We could not establish a single store closure at Fosse Park between 2023 and 2026, and we want to be honest about why. That is not because nothing has closed. It is because the local newspaper that would normally carry those stories, LeicestershireLive, is a Newsquest title that blocks us, so an entire seam of local reporting is unavailable from here. This is a hole in our sourcing, not a clean record for the park. Please read the absence of a closures list as exactly that, and not as evidence that no shop has ever left.

Useful to know

Food Central

Food Central is the park's eating and drinking building, and it is worth treating as a destination in its own right rather than a food court you stumble into. The Changing Places toilet, the baby change and the main toilets are on its second floor. Dogs are not allowed inside it.

The Fosse Foxes

There is a sculpture trail of foxes around the park. If you are visiting with children who are not remotely interested in a two-hour shopping trip, this is the thing that will buy you the two hours. It costs nothing and it is genuinely a reason to walk the whole site rather than park outside one shop and leave.

There are no gift cards

This is one to know in advance, because the assumption runs the other way. Fosse Park does not offer a gift card of any kind, and its own FAQ says so outright. If you were planning to buy a centre-wide card as a present, you will need to buy from an individual retailer instead.

Cash

Cash machines are at Marks & Spencer and outside Boots. We found no others confirmed.

Charging the car

The 16 charge points are in Fosse Park West only — a Tesla Supercharger installation together with Pod Point units, available from 6am to midnight with a three-hour limit. Charging is paid. Fosse Park offered free charging until 30 June 2023 and that arrangement has ended, so if you last came before then, do not expect it to be free now. If you are relying on a charge, note both the location (West, not North or South) and the midnight cut-off.

Things nobody publishes

For completeness, because an honest gap is more use than a confident guess: we could not confirm coach parking, a taxi rank, lockers, a click-and-collect point, or any car park height limit. We also could not establish what Modern Mobility charges or whether its equipment must be booked. None of these is confirmed absent — they are simply unpublished. If any of them decides your trip, ring 0116 263 0603 first.

How it got here

Fosse Park opened in 1989 and was formally opened in 1990 by Rosemary Conley CBE DL, the Leicestershire-based diet and fitness author. The commemorative plaque is still there, in Fosse Park North beside the Barclays pod, and it is one of the few pieces of the park's own history that is publicly marked on the site itself.

Who built it, and what was there before, we could not establish. No operator, council, trade or planning source we checked names the original 1989 developer of Fosse Park, and none describes what occupied the land beforehand. For a park of this size and age that is a surprising blank, but it is a blank, and we would rather leave it open than fill it from an unsourced encyclopedia entry.

2014 is the year the ownership changed. The Crown Estate bought Fosse Park in a 50/50 partnership with Gingko Tree Investments, a Chinese investor, from Foyleside of Northern Ireland. The price is reported two ways and we are printing both: IPE gave £346m, while an Insider headline gave £345m. That is a million pounds apart on a deal of that size, which is close enough to be a rounding difference in someone's newsroom, but neither publication corrects the other so neither figure is ours to discard. We could not pin down the exact date of the transaction, and we could not establish whether Gingko Tree still holds its half today.

At the time of that sale, the park was described as about 560,000 sq ft.

In November 2019 the extension was announced, and here too the money is reported two ways. The figure we have seen most consistently is £168m; a Property Week headline put it at £150m, but that page returns an HTTP 403 to us and we cannot read the article behind the headline to see how it is qualified. Both are printed; neither is resolved.

The extension added 140,000 sq ft and was described as making the park around 40% bigger. Those two claims sit oddly together, and so does the arithmetic overall. An extra 140,000 sq ft on a 560,000 sq ft park is closer to a quarter than to two fifths; and 560,000 plus 140,000 comes to 700,000, not the 758,500 sq ft the park is credited with today. There are perfectly plausible explanations — different definitions of floorspace, other works not counted as part of the headline extension, figures measured years apart — but no source offers one, so that reasoning is ours and not a published fact. What we can do is print all three numbers and let you see the discrepancy rather than hide it.

The extension was built by Bowmer + Kirkland, which is a nice piece of continuity: the same contractor built the original park in 1989. It opened in two stages — collection-only from 1 April 2021, during the tail end of the pandemic trading restrictions, and fully open to the public on 12 April 2021.

The sustainability specification published for the extension is unusually detailed, and worth recording because it explains some of what you see on site: 16 electric vehicle charge points, 172 cycle spaces, 500 photovoltaic panels, 5,000 sq m of planting, 12 apprenticeships and 27 work placements.

The footfall trend is the clearest measure of how the park has done. About 8m visits in 2014, more than 11m in 2019, and 13.3m in 2022 — the most recent figure published anywhere, and one that puts Fosse Park among the busier out-of-town destinations in the country. Nothing more recent than 2022 has been released, so we cannot tell you how the extension has bedded in over the past few years.