Hankridge Farm Retail Park, Taunton: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

The big out-of-town shopping on the eastern edge of Taunton goes by one name in conversation and four on paper. There is no scheme called “Hankridge Farm Retail Park”. There is Taunton Retail Park, there is Deane Retail Park, there is a Sainsbury’s and a B&Q on their own sites at Heron Gate, and there is a Grade II listed farmhouse that is now a pub. No operator runs the lot and none of them has a website. Here is who publishes what, which shop sits in which park, and the long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 13 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Hankridge Farm sits on the eastern edge of Taunton, in the Riverside district, between the town and the M5. It is where Taunton does its bulky shopping: a Sainsbury's superstore, a B&Q, The Range, Currys, B&M, Halfords, Hobbycraft, Oak Furnitureland, a Costa, a Pizza Hut, a Starbucks drive-thru, a Travelodge and a pub. Locally it is all one place and everyone calls it Hankridge.

On paper it is nothing of the kind, and that is the most useful thing we can tell you. "Hankridge Farm" is a place name, not a scheme name: no landlord, manager or agent publishes anything called "Hankridge Farm Retail Park". What exists is two separately owned retail parks sharing a postcode — Taunton Retail Park and Deane Retail Park, both on Hankridge Way — plus a Sainsbury's and a B&Q on their own sites at Heron Gate. Sainsbury's, Argos and Travelodge all use "Hankridge Farm" in their addresses, which is why the name has stuck to the lot.

There is no operator website. Not a dead one, not a blocked one — none at all. No scheme site, no management company, no centre phone number, no centre manager. The consequence for this page: no operator opening hours, no parking policy, no accessibility page, no directions. Everything below comes from the retailers' own store pages, the two letting agents, Somerset Council's committee papers, the Sainsbury Archive and Historic England.

The motorway junction needs care. The letting agent for Taunton Retail Park says the park is "located by Junction 25 of the M5 Motorway" and the pub says it is two minutes from Junction 25 — an agent and a publican, not an operator. One live letting particular for the other park on the same road says Junction 25 of the M25, a motorway about 130 miles away. Use the postcodes, and the right one of the two.

There are no open A1 retail warehouse parks.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on 13 September 2026, entirely on the retailers' own websites — because there is no operator website to check. Nobody publishes park hours here. Each shop keeps its own, and you go retailer by retailer.

Four readable, five not. B&Q, The Range, Currys and the pub publish proper times on their own pages. Sainsbury's, B&M, Hobbycraft, Halfords and the Starbucks do not, at least not to us. Sainsbury's store page returns the line "JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make this app work" and nothing else; the B&M, Hobbycraft and Halfords pages return site navigation and inject the store detail afterwards. The pages exist; the times are not in them.

We have deliberately not filled the gap from the opening-hours aggregators. Half a dozen carry times for every shop here. They are scraped, undated, and none says when it last checked; printing them would look more complete and be less true.

Nothing is published anywhere about bank holidays, Easter, or Christmas and New Year. For most destinations that comes from the operator; here there is none. The larger units are all well over 280 square metres, so they fall under the six-hour Sunday rule in the Sunday Trading Act, which fits every Sunday time above — but that is us reading the statute, not a source telling us.

Getting there

By road — and get the postcode right

There are two postcodes and they are not interchangeable. TA1 2LR is Hankridge Way — Taunton Retail Park, Deane Retail Park, the pub and the Travelodge. TA1 2LP is Heron Gate — the B&Q, and the Sainsbury's on one of its two published addresses. A satnav sent to TA1 2LR will not put you outside B&Q, so decide which shop you want first.

On the motorway junction, here is exactly who says what. There is no operator for either park, so no operator publishes a junction. Edgerley Simpson Howe, the agent for Taunton Retail Park, describes it as "situated on Hankridge Way, located by Junction 25 of the M5 Motorway"; The Hankridge Arms says it is "approximately two minutes from Junction 25". Those are the two published statements and they agree. The same agent puts about 157,000 people within a 20-minute drive, with Exeter 28 miles south and Bristol 39 miles north. No cycle parking, coach parking or taxi rank is published for the cluster by anybody.

And here is the warning. The live letting particular for Deane Retail Park — the other park, on the same road — describes the site as adjacent to Sainsbury's and "Junction 25 of the M25 Motorway". The M25 is the London orbital, about 130 miles away. It is a slip on a professional document, but slips get copied onto listing sites: if you see the M25 attached to this address, it is wrong.

Parking

All surface parking, all free at the point of use. Deane Retail Park publishes 163 spaces — the only space count anybody publishes here. The only time limit for Taunton Retail Park comes from a tenant: The Range's store page offers "complimentary parking for three hours". Whether that applies park-wide or only to The Range's frontage nobody states, and there is no landlord publishing a policy to ask. No enforcement contractor or ANPR operator is named anywhere, and no height restriction is published for any car park here.

By train and bus

The station is Taunton, on the Bristol to Exeter main line, with Great Western Railway services. Nobody publishes a walking distance or time from the station to Hankridge Farm — not an agent, not a retailer, not the train operator — and we will not estimate one. Nor could we source a single bus route number for Hankridge Farm from any publisher: there is no operator page to carry one. Both are gaps in what is published rather than claims that no bus runs. Check a live journey planner first.

Accessibility

There is no AccessAble guide and no Euan's Guide entry for either park, the Sainsbury's or the B&Q, and with no operator there is no accessibility page either. Everything published is at shop level: Currys says the park has "extra-wide parking bays" and describes step-free access from car to store; The Range lists disabled bays, disabled toilets and baby changing; the Argos page publishes accessible toilets inside the Sainsbury's. No Changing Places toilet, Shopmobility or wheelchair hire is published anywhere here — which means nobody has written it down, not that none exists. Ring the individual shop.

The shops

The shops are split across two separately owned parks and two postcodes, and almost every listing online blends them. Here is the split as the letting agents publish it.

Taunton Retail Park, Hankridge Way, TA1 2LR

About 87,700 sq ft, marketed by Edgerley Simpson Howe. Five names published:

• The Range — the big one, with a garden centre and café inside, plus Click & Collect, key cutting and Rug Doctor hire. 01823 443540.
• Currys — Unit 4.
• Oak Furnitureland — Unit 5.
• Pizza Hut — no unit number published.
• Costa Coffee — no unit number published.

One unit is vacant, and the agent publishes two different sizes for it — 9,048 sq ft "as a whole unit or in part" on the scheme page, and 12,148 sq ft on a separate listing for "2, Taunton Retail Park". Both from the same agent; we cannot tell whether that is one unit at two stages or two spaces.

Deane Retail Park, Hankridge Way, TA1 2LR

About 35,000 sq ft, owned by Blue Coast Capital, marketed by Curson Sowerby Partners with Morgan Williams, and — unusually here — published with proper unit sizes:

• B&M — Unit 1, 14,978 sq ft.
• Hobbycraft — Unit 2, 7,524 sq ft.
• Halfords — Unit 3, 9,991 sq ft.
• Starbucks drive-thru — 1,800 sq ft, run as a franchise by Southern Co-op.

The agent also advertises "potential for new unit construction" here, with no date attached. A note for searchers: third-party listings render this scheme as "Deane Park Retail Park" in B&M's address. Same park, not a third scheme.

Heron Gate, TA1 2LP — separate sites, not in either park

• Sainsbury's Hankridge Farm superstore, trading since 10 November 1992, with an Argos inside it (store 4475, 0345 601 5285), a petrol station, a free cash machine, free Wi-Fi and the fast chargers outside. Argos gives the address as Hankridge Way TA1 2LR; the Sainsbury Archive gives Heron Gate TA1 2LP, and nobody reconciles the two.
• B&Q Taunton (store 1312), with paint mixing, timber cutting, Timpson key cutting, showrooms and Rug Doctor hire. 0333 014 3529.

The pub, the hotel and the office park

The Hankridge Arms is a Hall & Woodhouse pub in the actual farmhouse — Grade II listed, about 1600, dog-friendly, food from noon. Travelodge Taunton shares the postcode; hotel particulars place it on "Riverside Retail Park, Hankridge", a fourth name for this address and not a scheme either agent publishes. Blackbrook Business Park next door is offices, not shopping.

What has gone, and why we cannot date any of it

The 2009 sale particulars list the tenants then as Homebase, Currys, PC World, Staples, Comet and Pizza Hut. Currys and Pizza Hut remain; PC World is now part of Currys. Homebase, Staples and Comet are gone. Comet collapsed nationally in 2012 and Staples' UK stores in 2016, but no source dates either closure at Taunton, and nothing says what became of the Homebase unit. The Range now trades a large unit here; it would be easy to draw a line between those facts, so we will say clearly that nobody publishes that line and we are not drawing it.

That is the full arrivals-and-departures record. There is no operator to announce lettings, no trade-press round-up, and not even a dated opening for the Starbucks: the Southern Co-op announcement that "the new Starbucks at Deane Retail Park in Taunton opens today" carries no date we could read.

Useful to know

Charge here — really

This is the standout practical fact about Hankridge Farm and almost nobody mentions it. Sainsbury's Smart Charge hub has six devices and twelve CCS connectors, most rated at 300kW with one at 180kW, at 72p per kWh, by contactless, RFID or Zap-Pay. Three hundred kilowatts on the edge of a Somerset market town beats a great many motorway services, and there is a supermarket, a B&Q and a pub attached.

To charge slowly and cheaply while you shop, Taunton Retail Park has four Connected Kerb 22kW Type 2 posts at 45p per kWh, 48p through Zap-Pay. Nothing is published for Deane or the B&Q car park. Both checked on Zapmap, 13 September 2026. And if you want the car park to yourself, B&Q opens at 7am Monday to Saturday, an hour before The Range and two before Currys.

Eat and drink

Costa and Pizza Hut on Taunton Retail Park, a Starbucks drive-thru on Deane, a café inside The Range — and, the reason to plan a trip around lunchtime, The Hankridge Arms: a Hall & Woodhouse pub in a listed farmhouse rather than a chain unit. Food from noon daily, dog-friendly, its own car park, and its own description of the building is "stone mullion windows, inglenook fireplaces, Oak and Elm panelled partitions and stone floors".

Things nobody publishes

We could find no Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility, no wheelchair hire, no quiet hours, no gift card, no lost property arrangement and no dogs policy for either park, and no "centre toilets" — The Range's are the only public toilets published on Taunton Retail Park. The free Wi-Fi, free cash machine and petrol station are all at the Sainsbury's, and all published by Argos rather than Sainsbury's. None of this means the missing things are absent; it means that with no landlord website and no centre management, nobody has written them down. Taunton has no clean-air zone, so there is nothing to pay before you drive in.

If you want a bigger day out

Hankridge Farm is bulky goods and a supermarket, not a fashion trip — the council's own consultants explain why below. The nearest alternatives are Clarks Village at Street, Affinity Devon at Sowton on the edge of Exeter, and Cabot Circus in central Bristol.

How it got here

The farm came first, and it is still standing. Hankridge Farmhouse is Grade II listed, list entry 1307558, first listed on 25 February 1955 — thirty-seven years before the first shop arrived. Historic England dates it to circa 1600 and describes it as "Rendered over rubble and cob, slate roof, coped verges, brick stacks gable ends": a U-plan house facing roughly north, five bays of mostly later casements but with "original hoodmoulds survive to C19 mullioned and transomed windows", and inside, jointed cruck trusses and a "depressed 4-centred head doorway".

The entry also records the building as in poor condition when surveyed in May 1984. It is now The Hankridge Arms: whatever one thinks of building a retail park round a farmhouse, the farmhouse got a use and a roof out of it. CAMRA adds "lime-washed walls and rare decorative plasterwork" and says the house "had also been used as a Reeve Court in the 17th century" — that claim is CAMRA's alone and the list entry does not mention it.

The shopping starts on 10 November 1992, when Sainsbury's opened at Heron Gate. The date comes from the Sainsbury Archive's own branch record, P/874, filed as "Taunton: Hankridge Farm (Heron Gate); 1992-present". The same record notes "three retail units built next to the Sainsbury's Hankridge Park store" — the first retail warehousing here — and a relief sculpture by the local sculptor Christopher Dean made for the store entrance. That 1992 date is the only firm opening date published for anything at Hankridge Farm. Neither retail park publishes when it opened, and neither does the B&Q.

Sainsbury's tried to get much bigger and was stopped. Taunton Deane Borough Council's committee papers of 17 December 2003 record that "during 2000, J Sainsbury submitted a planning application for a large extension to its store at Hankridge Farm (Taunton Riverside)". After extensive negotiations it was withdrawn, the officer attributing that principally to "the weight afforded to national retail policy", and Sainsbury's did an internal refurbishment and a minimal extension instead. A second application, 48/2007/055, reached committee on 12 December 2007, filed confusingly under West Monkton parish rather than Taunton. We could not read that report — the council's PDF was refused to us at the network layer — so we do not know its outcome and will not guess.

Taunton Retail Park changed hands in May 2009, when BP Investment Management bought it from Aviva for £17.77m — 87,800 sq ft let at £17 to £20 per sq ft, at a 9% net initial yield, the buyer advised by Edgerley Simpson Howe and the vendor by Montagu Evans. Tony Rogers of Edgerley Simpson Howe said at the time that "the retail park is of great regional significance and trades very well off low rents", and that BP "was quick to identify the potential and moved rapidly to secure the property in competitive circumstances".

And then the record stops. BP Investment Management is the in-house manager of the BP Pension Fund. No later sale of Taunton Retail Park has been reported anywhere we could find, and no source confirms who owns it today. Seventeen years is too long to carry a transaction forward as though it were current, so this page names the 2009 buyer and says the present owner is unpublished. Deane Retail Park is different — its letting agent names Blue Coast Capital outright, though without a price, a date or a vendor.

The last word belongs to the council's own consultants. In the Draft Office and Retail Market Update prepared by Avison Young for Somerset West and Taunton Council in September 2022, Taunton's out-of-town retail is measured at about 693,000 sq ft of retail warehousing, ranking the town 96th nationally, against a central shopping area of about 1.14m sq ft. The consultants judge that "the town has a restricted out of town retail offer" and note flatly that "there are no open A1 retail warehouse parks" in Taunton. That sentence explains the shape of Hankridge Farm better than anything the property industry has written: DIY, furniture, crafts, car parts, discount and a supermarket, and no fashion. The consents were never open, and the tenant list has followed them for thirty-four years.