Kingswood Retail Park, Hull: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

The big open-air park at Kingswood, north of Hull, has no operator website, no management phone number and no published opening hours of its own — and, more unusually still, no recorded opening year anywhere. This page sets out what is genuinely on the record about the shops, the 462 free spaces and the way in, keeps it separate from the three other Kingswood and Kingston names it is routinely confused with, and says plainly where the record simply stops.

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

Kingswood Retail Park sits on Althorp Road at Kingswood, in the north of Hull, and it is the main shopping destination for a large stretch of the city's northern suburbs. Next anchors it over two floors, with Matalan, Marks & Spencer Simply Food, Boots, TK Maxx, Sports Direct, Argos, JD Sports and a run of smaller units around them, plus an Asda on Bude Road that carries a Kingswood Retail Park address.

The park has no operator presence at all, and that shapes everything below. There is no website, no management or customer phone number, no park-wide opening hours, no footfall figure and no store directory published by anyone who owns or runs the place. kingswoodretailpark.co.uk returns nothing that references the park. The nearest thing to an official listing is the CompletelyRetail scheme page, which is a property-industry directory rather than a shopper resource — useful because it names the owner and the letting agents, but not written for you.

There is also no opening year, and we want to be very clear about what that means. No source we checked — Hull City Council's planning register, Asda's own store pages, yorkshire.com, CompletelyRetail, Hull Live — records when this park opened. The tightest bracket we can honestly give you is a planning one: reserved-matters application 97/00842/PM, explicitly labelled "Phase 2", received on 28 January 1997 and decided on 26 March 1997, with a companion application 97/00841/PM covering "Matalan Unit 1 to 3". A planning decision is not an opening date. It tells you a scheme was approved, not when the doors opened, and the "Phase 2" label means a Phase 1 came before it that we could not locate at all. If you see 1997 quoted anywhere as the year Kingswood Retail Park opened, that is a planning date wearing the wrong hat.

Four names get tangled here, so keep them apart. This page is Kingswood Retail Park, HU7 3DA, on Althorp Road. Kingswood Leisure Park is a separate scheme on Gibraltar Road, HU7 3DB, with its own brand and its own website at kingswoodleisurepark.co.uk — that site is not this park's site, and LoopNet has been seen filing a leisure-park bar unit under the retail park's name. Kingswood Parks is the residential developer for the wider area. And Kingston Retail Park on Holderness Road is a different Hull park altogether, with B&M and Home Bargains.

What follows draws on Hull City Council's planning register and the inspector's report into the Kingswood Area Action Plan, CompletelyRetail's scheme and letting information, trade coverage of the 2015 sale, retailers' own store pages, bustimes.org and Parkopedia. Where sources disagree, both are printed and named.

functional buildings of limited architectural interest, extensive areas devoted to the parking and movement of motor vehicles, and an absence of any significant areas of attractive public realm or landscaping

The essentials

Opening times

Checked 5 September 2026. There are no park-wide opening hours, because there is no operator to publish them. The times above are Next's own, taken from its store-locator page for Hull Kingswood, which was the only full week of hours available to us anywhere: Monday 9am to 7pm, Tuesday to Friday 9am to 9pm, Saturday 9am to 7.30pm, Sunday 10am to 4.30pm. Next is the anchor and the biggest unit here, so its pattern is the most useful single guide, but it is one shop describing itself.

Parkopedia gives a different picture and we are printing it too. It records site access as 9am to 8pm Monday to Saturday and 10.30am to 4.30pm on Sunday, and adds that the car park closes an hour after the stores. Those two statements cannot both be right alongside a Next trading until 9pm on four weekday evenings. We cannot reconcile them, there is no operator to ask, and Parkopedia is crowd-sourced — so treat the evening as the uncertain part of the day and check before making a late trip.

We tried the other obvious retailers and got nowhere: Boots returned 403, JD Sports returned 404, and Marks & Spencer and Argos are behind JavaScript that did not render store hours for us. The practical advice is the ordinary one — check the individual retailer's own website for the shop you actually want, and remember that any unit over 280 sq m can only open for six consecutive hours on a Sunday whatever a directory says.

Getting there

By road

Use HU7 3DA and aim for Althorp Road, Kingswood. There is no motorway anywhere near — Hull does not have one — so no junction number is possible, let alone published. The park lies off the A1033 near its meeting with the A1079 Beverley bypass.

We should be honest about where even that comes from. The road and rail distances published for this location belong to the neighbouring leisure park, not to this scheme. Kingswood Leisure Park publishes them; Kingswood Retail Park publishes nothing at all. The two sites are adjacent, so the directions are a reasonable guide in practice, but they are somebody else's directions and we would rather label them than let you assume the retail park issued them.

Parking

462 spaces, free, on an open surface car park with no height barrier. It is enforced by ANPR cameras run by G24, which means your registration is recorded on the way in and out and an overstay produces a letter rather than a windscreen ticket.

That makes the time limit the thing you need, and it is exactly the thing nobody states reliably. Parkopedia contradicts itself on a single page, saying both "free for customers (2 hours)" and "maximum stay of 4 hours". We are printing both because there is no operator source to settle it, and because Parkopedia is crowd-sourced rather than authoritative. Read the signs at the entrance before you walk off — with ANPR enforcement, the difference between two hours and four hours is the difference between a free afternoon and a parking charge.

Planning application 25/00192/FULL, approved with conditions on 18 August 2025, includes altered parking as well as EV charging points, so the layout and the space count may change. Neither the new parking arrangement nor the charging is in place as far as we can tell.

By bus

This is the part of the journey that is genuinely well documented. The stop is published as "Asda Kingswood" on Calthorpe Road. According to bustimes.org, which lists stop 2290YHA01499, it is served by Stagecoach routes 5, 6, 11, 11A, 12, 33, 62, 81, 110, 111 and 955. The 5, 11, 12 and 33 are the frequent links to Hull Interchange in the city centre and are the ones most people will want. Stagecoach's own route pages are behind JavaScript that would not give up stop lists, so bustimes.org is the source here and we have named it rather than implying the operator published this.

By train

There is no station at Kingswood. The nearest are Cottingham, about 4.5 miles away, and Hull Interchange, about 5 miles — but again, those distances are published by the neighbouring leisure park, not by this one. From Hull Interchange the frequent Stagecoach services listed above are the practical connection.

Accessibility

There is no park-wide accessibility statement, because there is no operator. What exists is store-level only: AccessAble has surveyed guides for the Next here, dated July 2022, and for Marks & Spencer. Those cover those two shops and nothing else.

We found no Blue Badge bay count for the park as a whole, no Changing Places toilet, no coach parking and no taxi rank recorded by anyone. One detail worth knowing if you are planning around facilities: the Marks & Spencer Simply Food here has had its café removed and has no toilets in store. If accessibility or facilities matter to your visit, phone the individual retailer — they are the only parties here who publish anything.

The shops

There is no operator directory, so this list is assembled from the letting schedule, CompletelyRetail and the retailers' own store pages. Eighteen units on the letting schedule, or twenty according to a retail directory; both figures are printed above because nothing exists to settle them.

The line-up, as recorded

• Next — the anchor, over two floors, with Costa, Lipsy, Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works concessions inside.
• Matalan — units 1 to 3, the same units named in the 1997 companion planning application.
• Marks & Spencer Simply Food — unit 12. The café has been removed and there are no toilets in store.
• Boots — around 13,500 sq ft.
• TK Maxx — around 10,000 sq ft.
• Sports Direct — around 10,100 sq ft, store 142, confirmed trading.
• Argos — unit 5.
• JD Sports, Mountain Warehouse, Card Factory, The Works, WHSmith, TUI, Costa, Subway and Greggs.
• Asda on Bude Road carries a Kingswood Retail Park address, so it is worth treating as part of the same trip even though it sits on its own site.

Unit 4A1, about 2,000 sq ft, was vacant. At the 2015 sale the park was fully let to 14 retailers.

What has arrived, and what has gone

We could not find a single dated arrival or departure since 2023, and we would rather tell you that than invent a sense of movement. We searched 2024, 2025 and 2026 against opens, closes and new store, and against the obvious fascias here. The only trace of anything was a Hull Live social post referring to "a brand-new store" whose underlying article never surfaced and whose post was unreadable to us.

Local press coverage of this park is effectively nil. That is not evidence of stability — a park can lose and gain tenants without anyone writing it up, particularly one with no landlord issuing announcements — it is simply an absence of reporting. Assume the list above may be out of date at the edges and check the specific shop before travelling for it.

What is coming

One thing is in the pipeline. Application 25/00192/FULL was approved with conditions on 18 August 2025, covering an extension to the Matalan unit and its subdivision into two units, together with altered parking, EV charging points and substations. No incoming tenant had been named as at 5 September 2026. That is the sort of scheme that usually precedes a new fascia arriving, but nobody has said who, and we are not going to speculate.

Useful to know

Eating and drinking

Costa, Subway and Greggs on the park, plus the Costa concession inside Next. Note that the Marks & Spencer Simply Food no longer has a café. For anything more substantial, the neighbouring Kingswood Leisure Park is the usual answer — but it is a separate scheme with its own operator and its own hours, and nothing on this page describes it.

Toilets

Worth planning for. No park-level toilet provision is published by anyone, and the M&S Simply Food here has no toilets in store. We could not confirm what the other units offer.

Parking, again

The combination of ANPR enforcement by G24 and a time limit that Parkopedia states two different ways — two hours in one line, four hours in another — is the single most likely way to have a bad experience here. The signs at the entrance are the only authoritative statement of the rule, so read them.

Things nobody publishes

Because there is no operator, all of the following are unknown for this park: a park-wide accessibility statement, Blue Badge bay numbers, Changing Places provision, coach parking, a taxi rank, cycle parking, Wi-Fi, a customer service desk, a dogs policy and lost property arrangements. None of that means these things are absent. It means no source states them, and we are not going to describe facilities we cannot cite.

Do not follow the wrong Kingswood

kingswoodleisurepark.co.uk belongs to the leisure park on Gibraltar Road, HU7 3DB. Its hours, its facilities and its directions describe that site, not this one. LoopNet has filed at least one leisure-park bar unit under this park's name, so property listings are not a safe way to tell them apart either.

How it got here

Start with the honest position: nobody publishes when Kingswood Retail Park opened. We checked Hull City Council's planning register, Asda's own store pages, yorkshire.com, CompletelyRetail and Hull Live searches, and the year is not on the record in any source we are willing to cite.

The tightest bracket available is a planning one. Hull City Council reserved-matters application 97/00842/PM, explicitly labelled "Phase 2", was received on 28 January 1997 and decided on 26 March 1997. Its companion, 97/00841/PM, covers "Matalan Unit 1 to 3" — the units Matalan still occupies. Neither is an opening date. A reserved-matters approval is permission to get on with a scheme whose principle was already established; the shops open some unrecorded time afterwards. And because this one is labelled Phase 2, there was a Phase 1 before it that we could not locate at all. The park is therefore at least as old as 1997 and probably older, and that is as far as the evidence goes.

Ownership is better documented. Legal & General Investment Management bought the park from British Land for £58m, in a deal reported on 8 January 2015. It formed part of a £219.6m British Land portfolio disposal that also included the House of Fraser building in Birmingham. We searched for a subsequent sale across 2016 to 2026 — by name, against sold and acquired, in Property Week, React News, CoStar and TheBusinessDesk — and found none, and no L&G fund schedule we could see names the asset. So L&G is the best available answer rather than a freshly reconfirmed one.

The most revealing document about this park is a planning inspector's report. In his Report on the Examination of the Kingswood Area Action Plan, published on 31 May 2016, the inspector William Fieldhouse described the retail park in the words quoted above — functional buildings, a great deal of space given over to parking and vehicle movement, and no real public realm or landscaping. It is not a flattering description, and it is not meant to be: it is the assessment that underpins the plan's approach. That same report designates the park a district centre while barring retail development on the adjoining land, which is the reason the park has not spread outward in the two decades since.

Two other pieces of local context are on the record and both ended in the negative. Between 2016 and 2017, a separate £32m, ten-unit scheme on Ashcombe Road, promoted by Kingswood Parks Development Company with Kier, was refused twice and then dismissed on appeal on 21 December 2017; Councillor Martin Mancey was quoted at the time on the effect such schemes have on the city centre. In June 2022, a Levelling Up bid covering the Dunswell roundabout and a Stoneferry Road park and ride was put forward, with Mark Jones, director of regeneration, speaking for the council. We could not verify the outcome of either.

The only live matter is the 2025 approval — application 25/00192/FULL, approved with conditions on 18 August 2025 — to extend the Matalan unit and subdivide it into two, with altered parking, EV charging and substations. No incoming tenant has been named. It is the first sign of change here that we can date at all, which tells you a good deal about how quietly this park has been running.