Lowry Outlet, now Quayside MediaCityUK: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

The outlet mall on the waterfront at Salford Quays has changed its name and lost its old website. Lowry Outlet was rebranded Quayside MediaCityUK in March 2020, lowryoutlet.co.uk no longer serves a page, and the way in now is mediacityuk.co.uk/quayside/. Here is what is on the site, what is published about parking, hours and getting there, who actually owns it — and, unusually, how much of that last question nobody has answered.

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

Lowry Outlet sits at 11-15 The Quays, on the waterfront at Salford Quays, on the opposite bank from the Imperial War Museum North and a few minutes walk from the Metrolink. It is an indoor outlet mall on two floors with a cinema, a gym and a food hall attached, and it has been part of the furniture at the Quays for around a quarter of a century.

The first thing to know is the name. The mall was rebranded Quayside MediaCityUK in March 2020, announced on 6 March 2020 as part of a £26m redevelopment. We have kept "Lowry Outlet" in the title of this page because that is still the name most people search for and the name most locals use, but if you are looking for the operator's own pages it is Quayside you want. The live address is mediacityuk.co.uk/quayside/. The old lowryoutlet.co.uk is dead — it bounces between http and https without ever serving a page, and a cached variant we found on port 8443 carried a marketing tracking string of the sort you see on parked domains. Do not trust anything you find there.

The second thing is that four different places at Salford Quays get muddled together, and their figures do not transfer. This page is about the outlet mall. The Lowry is the arts centre next door — a separate organisation at thelowry.com, opened in 2000, whose 25th anniversary Salford City Council marked in April 2025, and which has its own coach park. Imperial War Museum North opened in 2002 and sits across the Millennium Bridge. MediaCityUK is the wider estate — dock10, the BBC, ITV — whose first phase opened in 2011. Store counts, visitor numbers and parking figures quoted for "MediaCityUK" almost always describe the whole estate rather than the mall.

The third thing is the ownership, and we are not going to simplify it. Part of the site sits within Landsec's MediaCity estate; a company called Lowry Outlet Limited, Companies House number 10610137, is still registered to Peel. The two facts sit side by side in the public record and nothing we found reconciles them. The detail is in the essentials table and in the history section below.

What follows is drawn from the MediaCityUK operator pages, a second site at quaysidesalford.co.uk that we could not certify as operator-run, Companies House, Place North West, Prolific North, SalfordNow, Salford City Council's own news pages, Visit Salford, Parkopedia and the EV network Evyve. Where two sources disagree we have printed both. Where nobody publishes something — and on this site that includes the opening year, the footfall and any day-by-day opening times — we say so rather than filling the gap.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked 5 September 2026, and this is thinner than we would like. The only shop opening times we could find for the whole scheme are a blanket "10am to 6pm daily", and they come from quaysidesalford.co.uk — the site we could not certify as operator-run. Four pages across the MediaCityUK operator family gave us nothing at all: no table, no times, not even a general statement.

We also tried the trick that has worked on other sites in this project, which is to read a big tenant's own store-finder page. It failed here. Marks & Spencer's page for this branch rendered as a navigation shell with no times in it. We did not get as far as trying Next, Crew Clothing or Trespass, so there may still be a route in that we have not taken.

The Vue times are the cinema's own and are the most solid figures in the table: Monday to Friday 10am to midnight, Saturday and Sunday 9am to midnight, across seven screens and 649 seats. Nothing at all is published for bank holidays, Christmas or New Year, and the gym publishes no hours we could read. If you are travelling any distance, or going on a bank holiday, phone 0161 848 1850 first.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode M50 3AH. Junction numbers are published here, but they are published for the MediaCityUK estate as a whole rather than for the outlet, and both the estate's own your-visit page and quaysidesalford.co.uk give the same pair: from the north, M60 junction 12 onto the M602; from the south, M60 junction 7, then the A56 and the A5603. That is the operator family speaking, so we are comfortable printing it, but it will drop you at the estate rather than at the mall door — follow the local signs for MediaCityUK and the Quays once you are off the motorway.

Parking

Two multi-storey car parks serve the site, the Waterside and the Underground. Both are barrierless and ticketless, with payment handled through YourParkingSpace — so there is no barrier to stop you leaving and no ticket on your windscreen to remind you, which is exactly the arrangement that generates a letter three weeks later if you forget to pay.

The tariff is disputed and we have printed both sets. The Quayside site gives £3 for 2 hours, £4.50 for 4, £5.80 for 5, £8 for 6, £18 for 12 and £24 for 24 hours. Parkopedia, which is crowd-sourced, gives £2.30 for 2 hours, £4.50 for 4, £8 for 6, £16 for 12 and £22 for 24. The two agree only at the four-hour band. Check the price on the machine or in the app before you commit.

The 1,300-space total and the 6ft 8in (roughly 2.03m) height limit are Parkopedia figures only. No operator source publishes either. There are 80 accessible bays, and Blue Badge holders get four hours free — but you have to enter the badge at the machine for it to apply.

By tram

This is the easy way in. The Metrolink stop is MediaCityUK, and the walk from the tram to the mall is given as five minutes. From Imperial War Museum North on the other bank it is seven minutes across the Millennium Bridge. MediaCityUK's own page says there are "three stops nearby" with "trams every 12 minutes" but does not name which three; the neighbouring stops on the line are Harbour City and Broadway, though that identification is not the operator's. Transport for Greater Manchester's own stop pages are live-departure boards and gave us no walking distances at all.

By train

There is no railway station at the Quays. The practical route is to come into Manchester Piccadilly or Manchester Victoria and change onto the Metrolink; Salford Crescent is also named as a nearby station. Nobody publishes a walking distance or a journey time from any of the three, so we cannot give you one.

By bus

Two different lists exist and neither is complete. The estate page names services 50 and 79. The Quayside site names X50, 67 and 50. No frequencies are published on either.

Coaches

Coach parking is free, but it is The Lowry theatre's coach park, not the outlet's, and it needs booking 48 hours ahead on 0161 876 2421 or through groups@thelowry.com. The outlet publishes no coach arrangement of its own, so groups are effectively guests of the arts centre next door.

Accessibility

This is the biggest hole on the page and we are not going to paper over it. There is no operator accessibility page at all, and no AccessAble guide to the centre or to any shop within it. What we do have is the parking: 80 accessible bays and four hours free for Blue Badge holders, entered at the machine. Beyond that — lifts, accessible toilets, Changing Places facilities, hearing loops, wheelchair or scooter hire, quiet hours — nothing is published by anybody. If any of that matters to your visit, phone 0161 848 1850 before you travel, because the website will not tell you.

The shops

We could not read a live store directory for this site. The figure both the estate page and Visit Salford give is "85 stores over two floors", in identical wording and with no date attached. The list below is assembled from press coverage and cached text rather than from a directory we could open on the day, so treat it as a reliable sense of the line-up rather than a stocktake.

Shops

Marks & Spencer Outlet is the anchor. It was relocated within the scheme around 2017, moving to free up the waterfront units, and roughly £3.5m was spent on shop fronts as part of that work. Also recorded: Next Outlet, Whistles, Flannels, Crew Clothing and Trespass.

Eating, drinking and leisure

• KARGO MKT — the food hall, with around 20 independent traders. Named ones include Tang, Leopard Pie, Bab K, Jerk Junction and ThatZiki.
• 11 Central — a microbrewery on site.
• PizzaExpress and Turtle Bay.
• Vue — seven screens, 649 seats.
• Virgin Active — the gym.
• The Watergardens — the outdoor waterside element created by the redevelopment.
• The Treehouse — the ITV attraction tied to I'm A Celebrity.

Older marketing copy for the site refers to a 400-seat food court. That predates KARGO MKT and we have not been able to establish whether it describes the same space under an earlier name.

What has arrived and what has gone

We found nothing dated at all between 2023 and 2026, across two separate research passes. Not one arrival with a date on it, not one departure. That is a genuine gap in the record rather than a quiet period we are inferring: an Insider Media headline reading "New tenant for Quayside MediaCityUK" exists, but the article is blocked to us by the site's own robots file, so we cannot tell you which tenant or when. We would rather say that plainly than pad the section with undated names.

Useful to know

The discount claim

It is still run as an outlet, and the operator says so — but not consistently. One operator page claims "up to 60% off" and another claims "up to 70% off". Both are the operator's own words on the operator's own pages, so we have printed both rather than picking the more flattering one.

Which website to trust

Three addresses are in circulation and only one is safe. mediacityuk.co.uk/quayside/ is the live operator page and quaysidemediacityuk.co.uk redirects to it. lowryoutlet.co.uk is dead. quaysidesalford.co.uk resolves and is genuinely the most detailed thing we found — it is where the parking tariff, the Blue Badge concession, the road directions and the cinema information came from — but we could not certify it as operator-run, and everything we took from it is labelled as such on this page.

The M41 address

If you see a Trafford postcode in the M41 area on quaysidesalford.co.uk and assume it is an error, it is not. That is Peel's registered office at the Venus Building, and it is a genuine company address rather than a mistake. It is not where you should drive to.

What is next door, and is not this

Four separate things share this waterfront and their numbers do not transfer. The Lowry is the arts centre, a separate organisation at thelowry.com, opened 2000, 25 years old in April 2025 by Salford City Council's own reckoning, with its own coach park. Imperial War Museum North opened in 2002 and is across the Millennium Bridge. MediaCityUK — dock10, the BBC, ITV — opened its first phase in 2011 and is the estate the mall sits inside. If a figure is quoted for "MediaCityUK", assume it covers the estate rather than the shops.

Things nobody publishes

There is no footfall figure of any kind. There is no accessibility information beyond the parking. There are no bank holiday, Christmas or New Year hours. There is no confirmed cash machine, no confirmed VAT refund or tax-free shopping desk, and no published dog policy. None of that means these things are absent — only that nobody has put them in writing where we could find them.

How it got here

The Quays were docks first. Salford Docks closed in 1982, the council bought the land and regenerated it between 1983 and 1989, and the Metrolink reached the site in 1998. The Lowry arts centre opened in 2000, Imperial War Museum North in 2002, and the outlet mall arrived between the two.

Exactly when it opened, we cannot tell you. The only source we found that puts a year on it is salfordquaysarchive.wordpress.com, an enthusiast archive, which says 2001. Two separate passes through the operator's pages, Salford City Council, the Manchester Evening News, Place North West and Prolific North produced no opening date at all. Anyone quoting you a founding year for Lowry Outlet is probably repeating that same single unofficial source, and we have not hardened it into a fact.

MediaCityUK phase one opened in 2011, dropping a national broadcasting estate around a mall that had been trading on its own for a decade. In August 2012, Peel L&P bought the outlet from the Emerson Group for £70m, as reported by Place North West, and ran it through an operating business called Lifestyle Outlets. A £13m waterside plan announced in September 2016 was abandoned. The Marks & Spencer relocation within the scheme came around 2017, freeing up waterfront units, with roughly £3.5m spent on shop fronts.

The scheme that actually happened went to consultation on 4 August 2018: a £26m redevelopment branded The Watergardens, with Chapman Taylor as architect and WYG and BECG on the team. The rebrand followed on 6 March 2020, when Lowry Outlet became Quayside MediaCityUK, with completion targeted for autumn 2020. Around 35,000 sq ft of the roughly 300,000 sq ft scheme became new food and drink space.

The ownership question is where the record stops being tidy, and it has not been resolved. On 4 November 2024 Landsec announced it had bought Peel's remaining 25% of MediaCityUK for £83m, moving from 75% to full ownership of the estate. Every piece of coverage of that deal we could read is about dock10, the studios and a 218-bed hotel; none of it names the retail. Companies House tells the same split story from the other end. Media City Salford Limited (05998345) was called Peel Media Limited until 4 November 2024 and now carries Landsec entities among its directors, appointed 31 October 2024, with LS Director Ltd in place since 2 November 2021. Lowry Outlet Limited (10610137), meanwhile, was still registered at Peel's Venus Building address in Trafford on filings made in May 2025, with Whittaker, Underwood, Whitworth and Eves as directors and no Landsec entity anywhere on it.

So: part of the site sits within Landsec's MediaCity estate, and Peel holds Lowry Outlet Limited. Both of those statements are supported by the public record on the dates given, and nothing published reconciles them into a single answer. We have printed the split rather than picking a landlord, and if you need to know who your letter should go to, the honest answer today is that it depends which of the two you are writing about.