Livingston Designer Outlet: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A covered outlet mall in the middle of Livingston, with the bus terminal at the front door and — unusually for an outlet — a car park you have to pay for until six in the evening. Here is what is inside, what it costs to park, the accessibility provision that is the best documented of any destination we have written up, and the handful of things nobody publishes.

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

Livingston Designer Outlet is a covered outlet centre on Almondvale Avenue in Livingston, West Lothian, roughly half an hour from Edinburgh and an hour from Glasgow by the operator's own estimates. It is a genuine outlet — the operator's own wording is "up to 60% off RRP" — and it is one of the very few we have looked at where the bus terminal is at the front door rather than a walk away.

The thing to sort out before you set off is which Livingston shopping destination you actually mean. There are three, and they are not the same place. This page is about the Designer Outlet. The Centre, Livingston is a separate, larger, full-price mall with 155 or more shops — Marks and Spencer, H&M, Boots, Next, Wagamama, Nando's — under different ownership, and Visit West Lothian lists it as a separate attraction. Almondvale Retail Park is a third scheme again. Store counts, floor areas and parking arrangements quoted for one do not describe another, and the "400,000 sq ft" figure that floats around for "the Almondvale Centre" is emphatically not the outlet on its own.

Whether the outlet and The Centre are physically linked, or share any parking, is not published either way by either operator. We are not going to assume it. If you are planning to do both in one trip, that is a question worth asking on the day.

One more piece of housekeeping. The outlet's own website is livingston-designer-outlet.co.uk, a standalone address that we verified live on 3 September 2026. That matters because Livingston has a McArthurGlen past, and McArthurGlen's own site publishes no Livingston pages at all — see the note below. We have printed the address that loads and made no claim about the brand behind it.

What follows comes from the operator's own pages, the asset manager's material, trade press, Companies House-era sale reporting, bus stop data, Historic Environment Scotland and one architecture source. Where a figure is published more than one way — and the store count is published five ways — we have printed all of them.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked 3 September 2026 — and for once, the operator agrees with itself. The same times appear identically on four separate operator pages: the homepage banner, the homepage week dropdown, the opening times page, the getting here page and the contact page. All were static and readable. That sounds like faint praise, but almost every destination we write up contradicts itself somewhere on its own site, and this one does not. You can rely on the weekday table above.

What you cannot rely on is holidays. No Scottish public holiday hours, no Christmas hours and no New Year hours are published anywhere — not on the operator's pages, not by the asset manager, not by Visit West Lothian. In Scotland that is a real gap: the local holidays fall differently from England's, and the New Year holiday runs to 2 January. If your trip lands on or near a holiday, ring 01506 423600 first.

The Wednesday quiet shopping hour, 9am to 10am, is a standing weekly arrangement rather than an occasional event. Note also that the Vue cinema, Flip Out and the adventure golf keep their own hours, which the outlet does not publish.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode EH54 6QX. No junction number appears on this page, and that is deliberate. The operator's Getting Here page publishes no motorway junction at all — its entire road instruction is to "Follow directions for Designer Outlet Centre or Designer Outlet 2". The M8 Junction 3 and the A899 that circulate freely online have no operator, no council and no Transport Scotland source behind them, and we are not going to be the page that launders them into a fact. Follow the postcode, then follow the brown signs for the Designer Outlet once you are into Livingston.

Parking, and what it costs

This is a paid car park, which is unusual for an outlet centre, so budget for it. There are 1,775 spaces in total. The multi-storey holds 1,500 of them, is entered from Almondvale North, works on pay-on-foot, and charges 50p an hour. The surface car park on Almondvale Avenue holds the other 275, works on pay and display, and takes coins or card.

Both are free from 6pm to 8am, every day. That is stated identically on two operator pages, so it is solid. On a Thursday, when the centre trades until 8pm, that means the last two hours of shopping are free to park for.

Both car parks hold Park Mark accreditation, and the multi-storey offers automatic valet parking from Tuesday to Sunday. One warning: a stray "up to 4 hours free" appears in the metadata of one operator page, and we could not match it to either car park or to any published tariff. We have not printed it as an offer, and you should not travel expecting it.

Neither car park publishes a height restriction. For a multi-storey that is a meaningful omission — if you are in a van, a roof box or anything tall, use the surface car park.

Electric vehicles

Six bays at 7kW in the multi-storey, charging 16p/kWh, and two faster bays at 22kW in the surface car park, charging 30p/kWh. There is a £1 minimum per session, and a £10 overstay charge once you have occupied an EV bay for four hours. That overstay charge is separate from the parking tariff, so a long charge in the multi-storey can cost you twice.

By bus — the real advantage

Livingston Bus Terminal is at the front door. This is genuinely unusual and it is corroborated: bus stop data describes Stance G as being "on Almondvale Avenue, near Livingston Designer Outlet". If you are coming without a car, this is much the easiest option, and it sidesteps the car park charges entirely.

We were able to verify only the routes calling at stance G: the X51, run by Stagecoach East Scotland from Dunfermline, and the 74, run by Lothian Country between Blackburn and Fauldhouse. The terminal has other stances that we could not enumerate, so treat those two as a sample rather than the timetable.

By train

Livingston has two stations and the operator names both: Livingston North on the Edinburgh line and Livingston South on the Glasgow line. Of the two, the operator points you at the southern one, describing the outlet as "just a short distance by taxi from Livingston South Station".

No walking time or distance is published from either station — not by the operator, not by West Lothian Council, not by VisitScotland. "A short distance by taxi" is the operator's own phrase and the most we can honestly give you. If you are arriving by train, plan on a taxi or on the bus terminal connection rather than on a walk you have not checked.

By air

The operator's own estimates are roughly 30 minutes from Edinburgh Airport and roughly 60 minutes from Glasgow Airport. Those are the operator's figures and no source qualifies them by mode or time of day.

Accessibility

The operator's accessibility page is unusually thorough and it is worth reading in full before a first visit. It publishes 77 Blue Badge bays; free wheelchair loan from Guest Services, run in-house rather than through a franchised Shopmobility scheme; free sensory packs; a quiet shopping hour every Wednesday from 9am to 10am; and Hands Free Shopping free of charge seven days a week.

There is a Changing Places toilet in the Lower Mall at the West End, near adidas, with a height-adjustable adult bench, a tracking hoist and a video entry system. The operator states plainly that this is not a baby-change facility — but it does not say where the baby-change facilities are, which is an odd gap in an otherwise careful page. Standard accessible toilets are in the Lower Mall near Guest Services, at the West End near Claire's and adidas, and in the Upper Mall by the Vue. There is also a discreet incontinence-product disposal unit in the Lower Mall male toilets, which very few centres provide and fewer still mention.

The one thing the accessibility page does not address is step-free access between the levels and around the site. Given how much else it covers, that absence is worth a phone call if it matters to you.

The shops

The operator's directory listed around 70 names when it was read on 3 September 2026, although the count itself is published five different ways — see the essentials table above. The line-up leans heavily towards sportswear and outdoor, which is the centre's evident strength.

The line-up, as published

Sport and outdoor: adidas, Nike Factory Store, Puma, New Balance, Under Armour, Castore, Vans, Skechers, Crocs, The North Face, Columbia, Timberland, Regatta, Trespass, Mountain Warehouse, TOG24, Barbour, Golf Apparel Shop and The Rangers Store.

Fashion: Belstaff, BOSS, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste, Fred Perry, Original Penguin, Levi's, Guess, French Connection, Reiss, Crew Clothing, Jack & Jones, Monsoon, Roman, Klass, LUKE, Skopes, Cavani, Weird Fish, Animal, M&S Outlet and Next Outlet.

Shoes, bags and accessories: Dune London, Kurt Geiger, Carvela, Clarks, Pavers, Radley, Samsonite, Ernest Jones, Fossil, Watch Station, Chapelle and Sunglass Hut.

Beauty, home and food: Molton Brown, The Body Shop, The Cosmetics Company Store, Beauty Outlet, The Fragrance Shop, Le Creuset, ProCook, Julian Charles, Bedeck, Lindt, Cadbury and The Works.

Two names need flagging. Visit West Lothian lists Gap and Ted Baker at the outlet, and neither appears in the operator's own directory. We could not resolve the discrepancy in either direction — no opening and no closure is reported for either — so we have flagged it rather than counting them or writing them off.

What has arrived

• Nike — relocating within the centre and nearly doubling in size, due to open in late September 2026. The Daily Business Group reported the deal on 3 July 2026, alongside centre figures of 16% sales growth, an 18% rise in footfall and the sports category up 8%.
• Flip Out — around 20,000 sq ft, along with Sides and Hamilton & Brown, all in the first half of 2026.
• Monsoon, Belstaff, Crocs and Columbia — all during 2025. Only the year is published for these four, not the month.
• French Connection — June 2024. Retail Destination reported on 10 July 2024 that it had "opened last month".

What has gone

Not a single dated closure could be found, across two rounds of searching. We are recording that as a gap in the sources rather than as evidence that no shop has ever left Livingston Designer Outlet in twenty-six years. Trade press covers outlet openings enthusiastically and departures almost not at all, and that asymmetry is what you are seeing here — not an unusually stable tenant list.

Useful to know

Three Livingstons, not one

Worth repeating because it is the mistake people make. This page is the Designer Outlet on Almondvale Avenue. The Centre, Livingston is the bigger full-price mall with 155 or more shops and a different owner. Almondvale Retail Park is a third scheme. Nobody publishes whether the outlet and The Centre are linked or share parking, so do not plan a route between them on the assumption that they are.

Parking, in one line

You pay until 6pm, and after 6pm you do not. 50p an hour in the multi-storey, pay and display on the surface. If you are arriving late on a Thursday, the whole visit is free to park for.

Nearby, and listed

Historic Environment Scotland has nothing designated on or adjacent to the outlet site. The nearest listed structure is Livi Skatepark on Almondside (LB52626) — offered here as local colour rather than as a suggestion, since we cannot tell you how far it is or whether the walk is a sensible one.

Things nobody publishes

We looked for, and could not find, any operator statement on a dogs policy, Wi-Fi, lockers, cash machines, lost property, a loyalty scheme, tax-free shopping, gift card terms, coach parking, a formal taxi rank or the location of the baby-change facilities. That last one is the strangest, because the accessibility page goes out of its way to say the Changing Places toilet is not a baby-change facility without then saying where one is. None of these absences means the facility is missing — only that it is unconfirmed, and that a phone call to 01506 423600 will settle it faster than a website will.

How it got here

Opened October 2000 — and almost everything we know about the building comes from one source

The outlet opened in October 2000, developed by McArthurGlen. The month, the architecture and the later expansion all come from a single source, edinburgharchitecture.co.uk, and we are flagging that rather than dressing it up as a consensus. That source credits the glass roof to Don Hisaka and describes it as "inspired by the Crystal Palace"; names BDP and Miller Construction on the wider Almondvale Centre; records a £90m expansion approved in the summer of 2006; and dates the Almondvale extension to 2007 to 2008. No exact opening day is published anywhere, and no build cost for the outlet itself.

What was on the site before 2000 we do not know. Livingston is a new town, so the land has a documented planning history somewhere, but we did not find it and we are not going to guess at it.

The ownership chain, which is unusually well documented

Livingston has changed hands three times and each step is on the record.

• 2000 — developed and owned by McArthurGlen.
• 2006 — Land Securities comes in.
• 2013 — sold for £52m to LaSalle Investment Management. The sellers are named in the coverage as Land Securities, Aviva Investors, McArthurGlen and Richardson Property Group, which tells you the ownership was a consortium rather than a single name.
• 2017 — agreed in July, completed at the end of October, sold to Blackstone for £100m. Roughly double the 2013 price in four years.

Blackstone is the owner as far as anything published goes, and that deserves a small asterisk. No later sale has been reported by any source we checked — but no source since 2017 restates the ownership either. So the honest formulation is that there is nothing published to the contrary, rather than that ownership has been confirmed recently. No percentage stake is published and we have not invented one.

Realm, then Global Mutual — and nobody explains the join

Realm took a three-year management mandate in November 2017, immediately after the Blackstone purchase, with its managing director Colin Brooks speaking for it at the time. From 2024 onwards, every quote about this centre comes from Global Mutual, which manages Livingston alongside Junction 32, Dalton Park and Nailloux.

No source states that Realm became Global Mutual, or that one replaced the other, and whether Global Mutual holds equity here or is purely a fee manager is not published. We have printed what the sources show — Realm then, Global Mutual now — without inventing the connective tissue.

The McArthurGlen question

McArthurGlen built this place, and its name still attaches to Livingston in plenty of older writing. Whether it has any role here today is unconfirmed. We could not load mcarthurglen.com at all, and a site-restricted search of it returns no Livingston pages whatsoever — only York, East Midlands, West Midlands, Ashford and Cheshire Oaks. Livingston is also absent from the Frasers Plus destinations list, which currently names Braehead, Designer Outlet East Midlands, Designer Outlet Leeds, Luton and Designer Outlet Swindon.

Neither of those is proof of anything on its own, and we are not going to build a conclusion out of two absences. What we can say is that the outlet trades on its own standalone domain, and that is the address we have printed.

How it has been trading

The published run of figures is strong, and all of it comes from the asset manager's own announcements rather than from an independent audit. 2024 was a record year for sales, with outdoor up 35% and catering up 14%, and 27 December recorded as the second-highest footfall day in the centre's history. November 2025 was up 7.5%, with Black Friday up 13.3% on footfall up 8.5%. The period from 26 to 31 December 2025 saw sales up 8% and footfall up 3.2%, and the full fourth quarter of 2025 finished up 1.3% — described as its best Q4 on record. January 2026 came in 10.4% up year on year.

A £7m refurbishment completed in 2019 and won a Revo Gold Award, again on the manager's own account. The 6.6 million annual footfall figure comes from the same place and carries no year, so treat it as a scale rather than a measurement.