Inverness Shopping Park: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

The dominant out-of-town retail scheme in the Highlands, two miles east of Inverness city centre on the A96, anchored by a 105,000 sq ft Tesco Extra and the only multiplex cinema north of Aberdeen. It has had three names and all three are still in use — including on Next's own store page. British Land still owns it. Here is what could be established, what the sources disagree about, and the long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 12 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Inverness Shopping Park sits on Eastfield Way, about two miles east of the city centre on the A96 Nairn road, inside the wider Inverness Retail and Business Park estate. It is the biggest out-of-town shopping destination in the Highlands and, on its own letting agents' description, "the dominant out of town retail scheme in the city". The nearest comparable retail offer is in Aberdeen, more than a hundred miles away — which tells you most of what you need to know about why a park this size exists in a city this size.

Start with the name, because this park has three of them and all three are still in circulation. The operator and British Land call it Inverness Shopping Park. Next's own store page calls the same address "Inverness Retail Park", and so does AccessAble, and so — confusingly — did British Land itself in its January 2026 trading statement. And for a stretch it was branded Inverness Centre, a name dropped in March 2018 after it caused people to think Inverness city centre had shut down; the architect's website still files the job under it. None of these are different places. They are all Eastfield Way, IV2 7GD.

We could not reach the operator's website at all, and that shapes this whole page. The address invernessshoppingpark.co.uk is real and indexed, and two independent directories print it as the park's site — but every attempt we made to load it failed at the network layer rather than at the site. That means nothing on this page is the operator speaking: no operator hours, no operator store directory, no operator directions, no operator parking or accessibility page. Everything below comes from the letting agents, individual tenants' own websites, Highland Council, the Inverness Courier or third-party directories — and each is labelled.

On ownership, we can confirm British Land three ways. Its own press release of 11 June 2026 names the park as one of seven of its retail parks taking a Wingstop; the Inverness Courier named British Land as the owner of a vacant unit here in July 2025; and the letting agents' live scheme pages name British Land today. No sale of this park has ever been reported. British Land did buy an Inverness retail park for £28m in November 2024 — but on the evidence that was Inshes, across the city, not this one.

I'm delighted that they've responded so positively and realised this had been misleading to the public.

The essentials

Opening times

There is no operator opening-hours page on this site, because there is no readable operator site. Everything in the table above was checked on 12 September 2026 from tenants' own websites and from third-party directories. We have not picked a winner and you should not treat the park-wide row as gospel.

The disagreement is at the weekend. Two third-party directories give an identical park-wide set of 9am to 8pm on weekdays, 9am to 6pm on Saturday and 10am to 6pm on Sunday — and they may well be copying the same original listing, so treat them as one source rather than two. Next, on its own store page for Unit 4, says 9am to 7pm on Saturday and 9.30am to 6.30pm on Sunday. A retailer publishing its own trading times is better evidence than an undated directory, but it only tells you about Next.

A retail park may genuinely have no park-wide set at all. Unlike an enclosed mall, nothing here locks at a common time: each unit has its own front door onto the car park and trades when it chooses. The Tesco is the clearest illustration — 6am to midnight, seven days a week, which is six hours a day outside any "park" hours you might quote. If you are making a special trip for one shop, check that shop.

One Scottish point. Scotland has no equivalent of the Sunday Trading Act, so the Sunday hours above are commercial decisions rather than a legal cap — and the Tesco uses that freedom.

Getting there

By road

Use IV2 7GD. There is no motorway junction on this page and there never will be one — there is no motorway anywhere near Inverness, so there is nothing to print. The road is the A96, the Nairn and Aberdeen road, and the letting agents place the park "two miles east of the city centre on the A96 Nairn Road". A hotel guide in the city describes it as "located off the A96" and about five minutes' drive from the city's south side; a tourism directory puts it at roughly ten minutes east of the centre by car.

Access is from the Eastfield Way roundabout — Highland Council's road records call it the U2820 Eastfield Way Roundabout at Inverness Retail and Business Park. One detail from a council closure notice is useful for drivers: there is a separate slip road running straight into the Tesco, and when the roundabout was closed overnight for resurfacing in August 2023 the council's diversion took traffic out of the park via Inverness Campus, which adjoins the estate.

Parking

Parking is free, and every source agrees on that. The letting agents give 1,000 spaces; a tourism directory says "over 1,000 free spaces". No time limit is published by anyone, no enforcement company or ANPR contractor is named by anyone, and no height restriction is published for any car park at the scheme. That last one matters if you are collecting a sofa from the Sofology or a kitchen from the Wren in a hired van — you will have to judge the barriers on arrival, because nobody publishes a figure. No coach parking and no taxi rank could be confirmed.

By train

Inverness railway station is the city's only station and is the obvious arrival point for anyone coming from further afield. What nobody publishes is how you get from it to here. No walking distance, no walking time, no bus connection and no transfer advice from the station to Eastfield Way appears on the operator's site, the agents' pages, the council's pages or any directory we could read. We are not going to estimate it. If you are arriving by rail and heading straight out to the park, plan on a bus or a taxi and check locally.

By bus

A tourism directory puts the park at about 12 minutes by bus from the city centre, and a hotel guide says there are "regular bus services" nearby. No route number and no bus operator is named by any source we could read. That is a surprising blank for a park of this size, and it is a direct consequence of the operator's own getting-here page being unreachable. Check Traveline Scotland before you set out.

Accessibility

This is the thinnest part of the record and we would rather say so than pad it. There is no park-level access guide from AccessAble or Euan's Guide. AccessAble does hold a detailed guide for the Next store here — titled, inevitably, "Next – Inverness – Inverness Retail Park" — but it returned an error to us and could not be read. It exists, and it is worth looking up directly if step-free detail or bay dimensions matter to you.

What is confirmed comes from Tesco rather than from the park: the Tesco Extra publishes accessible parking, accessible facilities and a defibrillator. Beyond that, no Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility, no wheelchair hire, no quiet hours and no park-owned toilet block is confirmed by anyone.

The shops

The letting agents' live list showed 23 tenants when we counted it on 12 September 2026, with one unit vacant and marketed. Only five of those rows exposed unit numbers and floor areas to us, and the operator's own store list is behind the unreachable website. So this is a partial list, honestly labelled.

The anchors

Tesco Extra, at 105,000 sq ft — the one figure every source agrees on. A full Extra with a petrol filling station, Costa, F&F clothing, travel money, YO Sushi, Vision Express, a Tesco Mobile shop, an ATM and a Coinstar, trading 6am to midnight every day.

Vue, described by the letting agents as "the only multiplex in the Highlands". Two tourism directories say it has eight screens; neither Vue nor the operator confirms that, so treat the screen count as third-party.

Named tenants, with what the agents publish

• Next — Unit 4, 11,997 sq ft
• Sofology — Unit 1C, 12,800 sq ft
• Mountain Warehouse — Unit 3A3, 5,490 sq ft
• River Island — Unit 1A, 5,000 sq ft
• Nando's — Unit 3A2, 4,294 sq ft

Named by the agents without a unit or size: Boots, Superdrug, JD, Argos, The Range and Wren Kitchens.

What has arrived — the entire dated record is one letting

Wingstop, announced on 11 June 2026 as part of a single British Land deal placing the chain across seven of its retail parks — Reading Gate, New Mersey at Speke, Cyfarthfa, Glasgow Fort, Central Retail Park at Falkirk, Fort Kinnaird and this one — totalling 22,000 sq ft across all seven. No unit size and no opening date was published for the Inverness unit, and 22,000 sq ft is the seven-park total, so do not divide it. Matthew Reed, British Land's Head of Retail Parks, put the logic plainly: "Retail parks continue to benefit from structurally strong demand and limited new supply."

That is the whole of the dated arrivals record. Nothing else that has opened at this park in recent years carries a date in anything we could read.

What has gone

Carpetright, Unit 6C, closed in July 2024 when the chain's parent collapsed into administration, a national failure that cost around 1,500 jobs. The Inverness Courier went back a year later, on 3 July 2025, and found the unit still empty and still holding the stock that was in it when the doors shut, with EYCO marketing it as "under offer". No incoming tenant has been named.

Homebase, Frankie & Benny's, Pizza Hut and Burger King all appear on third-party listings for this park and on none of the agents' current material. Homebase and Frankie & Benny's both went through national collapses in the intervening period. But no closure at this park is dated by anyone, and a stale directory listing is not evidence of a departure, so none of them is written up here as a closure.

One unit was being marketed on 12 September 2026: Unit 5B2, 2,389 sq ft.

Useful to know

Check the shop, not the park

With no readable operator page and the third-party hours disagreeing with Next's own, look up the individual retailer's store page before you travel. The Tesco, at 6am to midnight, trades three hours before the shops and at least four hours after them, with the car park free and unrestricted throughout.

Do not confuse the four Inverness "parks"

This is the single most useful thing on the page, because online write-ups mix them constantly:

• Inverness Shopping Park, Eastfield Way, IV2 7GD — this page. Tesco Extra, Vue, Next, the shops.
• Inverness Retail and Business Park — the wider estate this park sits inside, and the name Highland Council uses for the whole area. It is not a separate destination next door; it is the estate around the shops.
• Inshes Retail Park, Perth Road, IV2 3TW — a genuinely different park on the other side of the city, 350,000 sq ft in nine units, with Matalan, Dunelm, PureGym, Hobbycraft, Deichmann, Bannatyne, B&M, Costa and McDonald's. Also British Land, also marketed by the same agents, which is exactly why the two get blended together.
• Inverness Airport Business Park, at Dalcross — an airports, Moray Estates and Highlands and Islands Enterprise venture. Nothing to do with either retail park.

Things nobody publishes

We could confirm no Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility, no gift card, no lost property arrangement, no quiet hours, no park-wide Wi-Fi, no baby-changing beyond what individual restaurants provide, no coach parking, no taxi rank, no cycle parking and no dogs policy. That does not mean none of these exist — only that with the operator's site unreachable, nobody else says so. If one of them decides your trip, ring the individual shop.

The Highlands context

The agents make a point worth repeating: the nearest competing retail destination is Aberdeen, more than a hundred miles away. Union Square in Aberdeen is the nearest thing of comparable scale, and British Land's other Scottish parks — Glasgow Fort and Fort Kinnaird — are in the central belt. That isolation is the whole commercial argument for the park, and it is why its 4 million annual visits and 320,000-person catchment are larger than the size of Inverness alone would suggest.

How it got here

We cannot tell you when this park opened, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Two tourism directories say 1997, and one of them adds a 2016 refurbishment. No council document, no trade report, no operator page and no primary source of any kind confirms either date, and the two directories may descend from the same listing. Both are printed here as what is commonly said, not as what is known — which for a scheme of nearly a quarter of a million square feet is a remarkable gap in the public record.

The one professional source on the build is the architect. Halliday Fraser Munro lists the scheme — under the old "Inverness Centre Retail Park" name — as a £20 million project of 25 retail and leisure units totalling 240,000 sq ft, with a 105,000 sq ft Tesco Extra and a Vue multiplex, for the client British Land, and says it has been involved "since the outset of the project and continues to be involved in upgrades and refurbishments". The page carries no dates at all, so it tells us who and what and how much, but not when.

The name is the best-documented thing about the place, and it is a proper local story. At some point the park was rebranded Inverness Centre. In November 2017 there was a glass canopy incident at the park that forced precautionary closures — the Inverness Courier does not describe what actually happened, so neither will we — and reports of "Inverness Centre" closing led people across the Highlands to believe that Inverness city centre itself had shut. City-centre traders lost business on the strength of it.

Inverness Business Improvement District and several businesses complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. Its manager, Mike Smith, told the Courier: "You can't put a figure on it but there will have been a loss of business." Before the complaints were resolved the park changed the name back. The Courier reported the reversal on 20 March 2018 under the headline "All change again for city retail park", crediting Councillor Isabelle MacKenzie with pursuing it both through Highland Council's Inverness city committee and directly with the agents. Neither British Land nor the managing agents returned the newspaper's calls — which, eight years on, is about the level of public communication this park still runs at.

Ownership has been stable and is not in doubt. British Land was the architect's client, was named as owner by the Courier in 2018 and again in July 2025, is named on both letting agents' live scheme pages, and named the park as its own in a press release in June 2026. The asset is held through the Hercules Unit Trust, British Land's retail park vehicle, per EYCO. No percentage holding is published for this asset and we are not inventing one. No sale of Inverness Shopping Park has ever been reported.

One transaction needs separating out, because it gets attached to the wrong park online. On 11 November 2024 British Land completed the £28m cash purchase of "Inverness Retail Park" from Greenridge Investment Management. Given that British Land already owned this park, and that the trade coverage of the deal illustrates it with a Dunelm and gives a Sir Walter Scott Drive address, the £28m purchase is almost certainly Inshes. The article that would settle it is behind a subscription wall. So: £28m is not the price of Inverness Shopping Park.

One footnote on the estate rather than the shops. In February 2017 Highland Council's South Planning Applications Committee considered a proposal of application notice, ref 17/00737/PAN, from the Scottish Prison Service for a new prison on "land to rear of Inverness Retail and Business Park, Eastfield Way". That is a pre-application notice and nothing more — we have not verified what was subsequently built, or when.