New Mersey Shopping Park, Speke: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A big out-of-town park on Speke Road in Liverpool, owned by British Land, with parking the operator itself calls completely free. This is a shorter page than most on this site, and deliberately so: the operator's website would not load for us across nine attempts, and there are no published opening hours, no opening date, no height limit, no EV charging and no visitor facilities we could confirm from anybody. Here is what does exist — and a warning about a different Speke park that gets confused with this one.

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

New Mersey Shopping Park sits on Speke Road in Speke, on the southern edge of Liverpool, and it is one of the largest out-of-town retail parks in the North West. It is owned by British Land, which took full control of it in 2024. The parking is free — and unusually for this page, that is the operator's own wording, not a third party's.

This page is thin, and we want to say why before you read it. The operator's website, newmersey.co.uk, would not load for us across nine separate attempts, in two different research sessions. The address is correct and the site is genuine — a handful of its question-and-answer subpages did render, which is how we have the parking wording — but the homepage, the car parking page and the opening-hours page all failed to respond. So there is no operator directory, no operator hours table, no operator directions and no operator facilities list behind anything below. The site is unreachable, not dead, and that distinction matters: try it yourself and it may well work for you.

Now the warning. There is a second, smaller retail park in Speke and the two get merged in listings all the time. Speke Retail Park is a different scheme, at L24 2WZ, owned by NewRiver, about 39,900 sq ft, with TK Maxx and B&M among its tenants. Its own letting particulars place it about a mile and a half from here. New Mersey is L24 8QB and is more than ten times the size. If you find a listing that puts TK Maxx at New Mersey, it has run the two schemes together, and its store counts and parking figures cannot be trusted.

Everything below comes from letting agents' particulars, a third-party mall directory, Historic England, planning and trade reporting, tenants' own store pages and the fragments of the operator's site that did respond. Every figure is labelled with who published it, both sides of every conflict are printed, and where nothing is published at all — on this page, most of the practical detail a visitor wants — we say so rather than filling the gap.

The essentials

Opening times

There are no published opening hours for this park, and the table above is four different sources disagreeing with each other. Checked 4 and 5 September 2026. The operator's own opening-hours page is on the site that would not load for us, so we have nothing from the landlord at all.

What we have instead: the letting agents say only that the park trades "until 8pm Monday to Saturday", with no opening time and nothing about Sunday. The directory ukmalls gives a full week — 9am to 8pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Saturday, 10am to 5pm Sunday — but it is a directory, not the landlord. And two tenants publish their own hours, matching neither: B&Q opens at 7am Monday to Saturday and closes at 8pm, Sunday 10am to 4pm; Next runs 9am to 6pm Monday, 9am to 8.30pm Tuesday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Saturday and 10.30am to 5pm Sunday.

We tried the trick that has rescued hours on other pages — hunting for a local news story about extended opening hours, which usually prints the full timetable. No such story exists for New Mersey. The Marks & Spencer store page is JavaScript-only and gave us nothing either. No bank holiday, Christmas or New Year hours are published anywhere by anybody. Check the individual shop you are travelling for, and do not rely on the park having a single set of hours at all.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode L24 8QB. That is nearly all we can honestly give you. No motorway junction is published for this park by anyone, and we will not supply one — a wrong junction on the approach to Liverpool costs far more time than no junction at all. The single piece of directional information that exists anywhere is the letting agents' listing on Completely Retail, which places the park on the A561 Speke Road, about seven miles south-east of Liverpool city centre. There is no operator directions page we could read, no route description and no landmark guidance.

Parking

Free, and confirmed by the operator itself: one of the few of its pages that responded to us answers the question about car park charges with "No, parking at New Mersey is completely free!" That is worth having in the landlord's own words.

The space count is third-party and it conflicts. Completely Retail records 1,850 spaces including 55 accessible bays; VisitNorthWest says "almost 2,000". Neither figure comes from the operator, so we have printed both. No maximum stay is published, no enforcement company is named, and no height restriction is published by anyone.

By train, bus, coach, taxi or bicycle

Nothing at all is published, by anyone, for any of these. That is not shorthand for "we did not look hard enough" — across two rounds of research we found no station named as the one for this park, no bus route number, no coach arrangements, no taxi rank and no cycle parking, from the operator, the council, a transport body or a third-party directory. If you are not driving, plan your journey to the postcode using a journey planner and do not expect the park to help you.

Accessibility

The only accessibility fact in existence is the 55 accessible bays in the Completely Retail listing. There is no AccessAble guide, no bay dimensions, no information about step-free routes, no mobility scooter hire, no Changing Places toilet and no confirmation of accessible toilets. We would normally have more than this, and we are not going to imply otherwise.

The shops

There is no complete directory on this page because the operator's site would not load. The names below are the ones that appear in sources we can cite — letting particulars, planning reporting, trade press and retailers' own store finders. It is not a full line-up, and the unit count itself is disputed at 43, 42 or "around 40" depending on who you ask.

Shops

Marks & Spencer (a Foodhall only), Next (Unit 5), Boots, H&M, B&Q (12 Speke Road), Smyths (13,017 sq ft), Holland & Barrett (1,441 sq ft), Tessuti and TGJones.

Leisure and eating

Cineworld (37,124 sq ft), Hollywood Bowl (20,175 sq ft), Ninja Warrior UK (23,438 sq ft), Wagamama, Five Guys (Unit L11), Popeyes, Pizza Express, Nando's, TGI Fridays and Zizzi.

What has arrived

• Popeyes — opened at 11am on 22 November 2024, with 80 indoor covers, 24 outdoor covers and a drive-thru. It is the only properly dated opening at the park we could find. Tom Crowley, chief executive of Popeyes UK, spoke about it to LiverpoolWorld on 13 November 2024; we have not reproduced his words because we do not hold them verbatim, and we will not paraphrase a named person inside quotation marks.
• Ninja Warrior UK — has arrived, and that is all we can say. The article covering it would not open for us and no opening date exists in any source we could read.
• Five Guys — trades here in Unit L11, but its opening date is unconfirmed. The only dated Five Guys opening story in Liverpool is for the Edge Lane branch on 14 July 2025, which is a completely different site. Do not let anyone attach that date to this park.

What is happening now

• Marks & Spencer is moving from a store of about 15,000 sq ft into a much larger one. Two publications give the new size differently for the same building, and we are printing both: Place North West says "just over 60,000 sq ft", made up of 39,000 sq ft at ground level and 22,000 sq ft of mezzanine; LiverpoolWorld says 5,750 sq m gross internal area, made up of 3,686 sq m and 2,064 sq m.
• B&Q is shrinking, from about 103,000 sq ft to 82,000 sq ft, with part of the garden centre demolished to make room for new gates.
• Both sit on amendments to a 2015 permission, submitted by Burnett Planning for the Speke Unit Trust and reported in January 2025, with 118 jobs quoted. We cannot tell you the current status of any of it — Liverpool City Council's planning portal refused every attempt we made to reach it.

What has gone

Handle this section carefully, because it rests on one unverified source. VisitNorthWest records Comet leaving in 2012 and HMV in 2013, and names River Island, Dorothy Perkins, Evans and Wallis as former tenants without giving dates. No other source we checked corroborates any of it, and no dates for the four unnamed departures exist anywhere. We have printed it labelled rather than dropped it, but do not treat it as established.

Useful to know

The other Speke park

Worth repeating, because it is the single most common error in listings for this park. Speke Retail Park is not New Mersey Shopping Park. It is a separate scheme at L24 2WZ, owned by NewRiver, of about 39,900 sq ft — roughly a thirteenth the size — with TK Maxx, B&M, Toolstation and Cancer Research among its occupiers. Its own particulars put it about a mile and a half away. Any page showing TK Maxx or B&M at New Mersey has merged the two, and every number on it is suspect.

Facilities

We have nothing to tell you, and that is the honest answer rather than an oversight. No visitor facilities of any kind are published for this park by any source we could find — no toilets, no baby changing, no cash machines, no Wi-Fi, no customer service desk, no lockers, no play area, no dog policy and no events. A park this size will have toilets somewhere; we are not going to tell you where on the strength of an assumption.

If you are driving

The parking is free in the operator's own words, which is the one solid thing on this page. But there is no published maximum stay, no named enforcement company, no height restriction and no electric vehicle charging published anywhere. If you are driving something tall, or arriving on a low battery, you are going in without information.

If you are travelling for one shop

Given four conflicting sets of hours and nothing from the landlord, check the shop you are going for, on its own website, on the day. B&Q opens at 7am and Next not until 9am; Sunday closing times differ between sources by an hour or more.

How it got here

We do not know when this park opened, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. VisitNorthWest gives 1985, and nothing corroborates it — no operator page, no planning document, no trade report and no local press account states an opening year, and no developer or original scheme name appears anywhere. Two separate rounds of searching turned up nothing further. That is a genuine hole in the public record for a park of well over half a million square feet, and anyone quoting a confident founding date is going beyond what is published.

The dated history that does exist is recent. A leisure extension opened in summer 2018 for British Land, with RPS Group as lead designer, architect and landscape architect, targeting a BREEAM rating of Very Good. It added an eleven-screen Cineworld and six restaurants. RPS described its own design in terms of the neighbourhood: the "circular drum and balcony design referenced the nearby historic airport", drawing on Art Deco hangar architecture.

That reference is to a real and remarkable building. Historic England's entry 1217911 lists the former Liverpool Airport terminal and control tower on Speke Road at Grade II*, listed on 19 June 1985, built by E. H. Bloomfield between 1937 and 1940, and calls it "the most complete civil aviation ensemble of the pioneer phase of international air travel to survive in England". Its gatepiers are separately listed under entry 1386588.

But we are not going to tell you the park is built on the airport. The relationship between the listed building and the park's boundary is unestablished in every source we consulted, and nothing we found ties this particular parcel of land to the airport, to Ford or to Dunlop, all of which loom large in Speke's industrial history. The architects referenced the airport in their design. That is a design story, not a land-ownership one, and it is easy to slide from the first into the second.

On ownership, the recent chapter is documented and the earlier one is not. British Land holds the park through the Speke Unit Trust, the applicant name on the 2024-25 planning submission. In 2024 it took the remaining 12.5% of the park inside a £240m retail-park programme bought from Brookfield and M7 Real Estate, announced on 5 September 2024. Simon Carter, British Land's chief executive, commented publicly on that £240m programme at the time, but portfolio-wide rather than about Speke. No price and no completion date for the Speke stake itself has ever been disclosed, and who held the other 87.5% before, and for how long, is not on the record either.