Ocean Retail Park, Portsmouth: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A seventeen-unit open-air park on Burrfields Road in Copnor, north-east Portsmouth, owned outright by The Crown Estate since 2011, with 600 free parking spaces and an M&S Foodhall, Lidl, B&M, TK Maxx, Currys and Smyths between them doing most of the work. It is not in the Portsmouth Clean Air Zone — we checked the council's own postcode list — and it has nothing to do with Ocean Plaza in Southport. Here is what the operator publishes, where its figures disagree with everyone else's, and the fairly long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 13 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Ocean Retail Park sits on Burrfields Road in Copnor, on the north-eastern side of Portsea Island, roughly half a mile west of the A2030 Eastern Road and two miles south of the A27. It is an ordinary open-air retail park of the sort that Britain built a great many of: a long terrace of big boxes, a drive-thru McDonald\'s, a Costa, and a car park you do not pay for. What makes it worth a page of its own is that it is one of the very few retail parks in the country owned directly by The Crown Estate, and that the Crown Estate publishes rather more about it than most landlords bother to.

Start with the web address, because there are two and one of them is a ghost. The park had its own site at oceanretailpark.co.uk and that domain is still alive — but every page on it now answers with a 302 redirect to retailparks.thecrownestate.co.uk/ocean-retail-park. We tested three separate old paths on the old domain and all three bounced. So the old address still works as a shortcut, but the Crown Estate\'s own retail-parks site is where the information actually lives, and that is the one we have used throughout.

Do not confuse this with Ocean Plaza. Ocean Plaza is a retail and leisure scheme in Southport, on the Irish Sea, about 250 miles away. It shares nothing with this park except the first word of its name, and search engines mix the two up constantly. If you are looking at a page about a cinema, a Pizza Hut and the Marine Lake, you are in Southport.

Portsmouth is unusually well supplied with places to shop, and it is worth knowing where this one sits in the pecking order. Gunwharf Quays is the outlet destination down at the harbour; WestQuay in Southampton and Whiteley Shopping Centre are the big comparison-shopping draws within half an hour\'s drive; Festival Place in Basingstoke is the next one up the A3/M3 corridor. Ocean Retail Park is not competing with any of them. It is a bulky-goods and food park — a kitchen, a carpet, a mattress, a supermarket shop and a toy run — and it is the sort of place Portsmouth people use on a Saturday morning rather than a day out.

The Clean Air Zone question has a clean answer, and it is no. Portsmouth has run a Class B Clean Air Zone since 29 November 2021, and a great many people assume that any drive into the city now costs money. It does not, and it certainly does not here. We went to the council\'s own published postcode list and no PO3 postcode appears on it at all. There is more on this below, including what the zone actually charges and who it actually charges.

What follows draws on the Crown Estate\'s own park page, the AccessAble access guide it commissioned, the letting agents\' scheme particulars, the trade coverage of the 2011 purchase and the local press coverage of the 2018 and 2019 lettings. Where two sources give different numbers we have printed both and said who published each. Where nobody publishes something — and at Ocean Retail Park that includes the opening year, which is a remarkable gap — we say so.

We are delighted to welcome another three fantastic retailers to Ocean Retail Park, further enhancing our offer and giving local people even more reasons to visit.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on the operator's page and on tenants' own store finders on 13 September 2026. The Crown Estate publishes exactly two lines of park hours — Monday to Saturday 9am to 11pm, Sunday 10.30am to 4.30pm — and then adds that individual store times vary. Both of those lines need reading carefully.

The 11pm closing time is not a shopping time. Nothing on this park sells carpets at half past ten at night. What trades late is the drive-thru McDonald's and, to a lesser extent, the Costa; the 11pm figure is best read as when the site as a whole is open and lit rather than when you can buy a mattress. Currys, the one tenant whose own published hours we could pull directly, shuts at 8pm on weekdays and 6pm on Saturday. Plan around the shop you actually want, not around the park's headline number.

The Sunday hours are the standard English large-store Sunday. 10.30am to 4.30pm is the classic six-hour Sunday trading pattern for shops over 280 sq m, and it is what you would expect at a park of big boxes in England. Smaller units — Costa, Subway, Card Factory, Wenzel's — are not bound by Sunday trading law and several of them will open earlier and close later. The operator does not say which.

There is a straightforward disagreement about the car park. Parkopedia lists the car park itself as open 8am to 10pm Monday to Saturday and 10am to 4pm on Sunday — an hour earlier at both ends of the week than the operator's park hours, and half an hour tighter on Sunday. Parkopedia is crowd-sourced and we are not printing it as fact, but if you were planning to arrive at five past nine on a Sunday it is worth knowing that two sources disagree about whether the barrier-free car park is notionally "open".

Tenant store finders are mostly unreadable here. The usual trick of cracking a park's hours by reading its anchors' own store pages half-worked. Currys and Bensons for Beds both serve proper server-rendered store pages with full weekly hours, and those are the two rows above. Marks and Spencer, Halfords and Lidl all returned navigation shells or a 404 on their own store-finder URLs, so we could not get their times from the horse's mouth and have not taken them from a third-party opening-times aggregator.

No bank holiday, Christmas or Easter hours are published by anybody. Not by the Crown Estate, not by the letting agents, not on any archived version of the old park website we could reach. If you are planning a bank-holiday run, check the individual retailer.

Getting there

By road

Use PO3 5HH, which is the postcode the operator itself tells you to use, or PO3 5NP, which is what the tenants and the letting agents use. Both land you on Burrfields Road. The Crown Estate does not publish a motorway junction number for this park, and we are not going to supply one. What it publishes instead is a pair of distances, and they are genuinely more useful for an island city: the park is "0.5 miles west of the A2030" — that is the Eastern Road, the dual carriageway that runs up the eastern edge of Portsea Island — and "two miles south of the A27", which is the road you come off for the M27.

The letting agents' particulars add the A288 to the list of roads that serve it and refer to M27 connections, but again without a junction number; the AccessAble guide says only that the park is "easily accessible from the M27", which is the same non-answer. Portsmouth is an island, and the practical instruction is simpler than any junction: get onto the A27 or the A2030, come south, and follow Burrfields Road. There is a reason nobody publishes a junction here — the useful landmark is the Eastern Road, not the motorway.

Parking

600 spaces, free, open-air, flat, and with no height restriction at all. That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is unusual and it is verified: AccessAble's survey for the Crown Estate states plainly that there are no height restrictions, and Parkopedia says the same. If you are collecting a Wren kitchen in a Transit or arriving in a campervan, this is one of the easier parks in the south to use.

It is ANPR-enforced. The park published a fair-processing notice about camera enforcement, which is what a site does when it runs number-plate cameras. Parkopedia names GroupNexus Limited as the car-park operator; that is crowd-sourced and we could not confirm it against the landlord, so we are flagging it rather than stating it. No maximum stay is published anywhere by anyone — not on the operator's page, not by the agents. Parkopedia says only that "maximum stay restrictions may apply". Read the signs in the car park before you settle in for a long lunch; parking-ticket complaints are a recurring theme in public reviews of this park.

The operator claims a Safer Parking Award for 2023/24. That is the British Parking Association's Park Mark scheme, and it is about surveillance, lighting and layout rather than about how forgiving the enforcement is.

Electric vehicles

There are charging bays near the Marks and Spencer Foodhall, run by Pod Point, with tariffs shown in the Pod Point app. That is the whole of what is published: no bay count, no charging speed, no connector type. Do not plan a long-distance stop around it.

By train

The nearest station is Hilsea. The operator calls it "a 20-minute walk"; AccessAble, surveying the same site, puts the station at 1.1 miles away. Those two are consistent with each other, which is more than can be said for most of the numbers on this page. Hilsea is on the Portsmouth line with connections towards Portsmouth & Southsea, Southampton and London. It is a small, unstaffed-feeling station and twenty minutes is a fair estimate on foot.

By bus

The operator names one service: Stagecoach route 21, which stops at Copythorn Road, described as "just a 10 minute walk" from the park. That is slightly odd, because there is a bus stop on Burrfields Road itself, registered in the national stop database as "Ocean Park (Westbound), Burrfields Road, Copnor" — right outside. We could not get the routes serving that stop to load, so we cannot tell you what calls there, and the operator does not mention it at all. Burrfields Road is a busy corridor and there are almost certainly other services on it, but the 21 is the only one the landlord commits to and we are not going to pad the list from timetable sites.

By bike

An 11-minute cycle from Portsmouth town centre, per the operator, with bike racks outside Costa Coffee. Portsea Island is flat and compact and this is a genuinely realistic way to get here, which is not something we can say about most out-of-town parks.

Accessibility

This park has a full AccessAble access guide, commissioned by the Crown Estate, which is a good deal better than the average retail park manages. The headlines from it:

• Step-free access from Burrfields Road, with the route from the car park to the units described as wheelchair-accessible without assistance. There is an alternative route with 8 steps and handrails at the recommended height.
• Blue Badge bays measuring 260cm by 500cm. AccessAble counts "10+" of them; the Crown Estate's own park page says "20+". We cannot reconcile the two.
• No height restriction on the car park, which matters for adapted vehicles and WAVs.
• Fixed bollards on the approach with a minimum clear width of 115cm.
• A hands-free shopping service and Click & Collect.
• External surfaces are stone and concrete paving, partially covered, with metal benches and wayfinding posts. AccessAble specifically flags "flooring which includes patterns or colours which could be confusing", which is a fair warning for anyone with a visual impairment or dementia.

And the things that are not there. AccessAble records no public toilets on the park at all — customer toilets exist inside some of the retail units and that is it. It also records no British Sign Language-trained staff, no mobility aids available to borrow and no assistance-dog facilities. There is no Changing Places toilet and no Shopmobility scheme. A defibrillator is on site per the operator, and baby changing is available in the M&S.

The shops

The Crown Estate's directory listed 17 brands when we counted it on 13 September 2026: B&M, Bensons for Beds, Boots, Card Factory, Costa, Currys, Dreams, Halfords, Lidl, M&S Foodhall, McDonald's, Smyths Toys, Subway, Tapi Carpets, TK Maxx, Wenzel's and Wren Kitchens. The letting agents count 16 units with one vacant — Unit 8, at 1,514 sq ft — plus an 8,000 sq ft plot marketed as a "potential new development".

What the mix tells you

Four of the seventeen sell beds, kitchens or carpets — Bensons, Dreams, Tapi and Wren. Two are supermarkets or food halls — Lidl and the M&S Foodhall. Three are catering — McDonald's, Costa, Subway, plus the bakery chain Wenzel's. That leaves B&M, TK Maxx, Smyths, Currys, Halfords, Boots and Card Factory as the general shopping. There is no fashion anchor and no department store, and there never has been in any line-up we have been able to document. If you want clothes beyond what TK Maxx happens to have in, you want Gunwharf Quays or Whiteley.

The two big lettings rounds, both dated

Unusually for a retail park, the recent history here is properly dated, because The News in Portsmouth covered both rounds.

2018: M&S Foodhall, Boots and Card Factory arrived together in spring 2018, a combined 22,200-plus sq ft. Donna Springall, then asset manager at The Crown Estate, described it at the time as "a really exciting time at Ocean Retail Park as we welcome three new stores". That round followed the arrivals of TK Maxx, Tapi Carpets and Costa and a refurbishment of the McDonald's, with landscaping works due to finish in early February 2018.

2019: The Crown Estate announced Lidl, B&M and Smyths Toys on 11 July 2019. B&M opened on Thursday 7 November 2019 and Smyths Toy Superstore on Saturday 9 November 2019, the two of them splitting the former Homebase unit between them. B&M said the store created more than 65 jobs and brought a garden centre with it. Lidl took the former Toys R Us unit. No opening date for the Lidl was ever published that we could find.

What has gone

The departures here are unusually well evidenced, because two separate sources capture the park at two separate moments.

From the 2011 sale coverage, the anchors when The Crown Estate bought the park were Currys, Homebase, PC World and Toys R Us. Of those four, only Currys is still trading — and it is trading as Currys rather than as the old Currys/PC World pairing, both of those brands having been merged nationally.

From The News's 2019 tenant list, the park then also contained Carpetright, Carphone Warehouse and Oak Furnitureland. None of the three appears on the 2026 directory.

None of those departures has a published date. Homebase's exit can be bracketed — it was trading in 2011 and its unit was being split for B&M and Smyths by mid-2019 — and Toys R Us's exit is bracketed the same way by Lidl taking the unit, but nobody published the closing dates and several of those chains collapsed nationally in the intervening years. All the comparison proves is who was here in 2011, who was here in 2019, and who is here now.

Space available

A 1,514 sq ft unit is marketed as to let, and there is an 8,000 sq ft "potential new development" on the agents' books. The agents cannot agree with themselves on which unit the 1,514 sq ft one is: the scheme page calls it Unit 8, while a separate property listing on the same site gives Unit 7 at exactly 1,514 sq ft and marks it "currently unavailable". It may be one unit listed twice. Neither has planning detail attached in anything we could read, so treat the 8,000 sq ft as an aspiration rather than a scheme.

The park has three names and a bus stop

Worth knowing if you are searching: the tenants do not all call this place the same thing. Costa's own store page gives its address as "Unit 9, Ocean Park, Burrfields Road"; Halfords' branch records list "Unit 4, Ocean Pk"; the Crown Estate and the agents both say Ocean Retail Park; and some mapping sites carry "Ocean Retail Centre". There is also a bus stop on Burrfields Road itself named Ocean Park, which is not the same as the Copythorn Road stop the operator directs you to.

Useful to know

The Clean Air Zone: you are outside it, and you would not be charged anyway

This is the question people actually ask about driving anywhere in Portsmouth, so here is the full answer. Portsmouth operates a Class B Clean Air Zone, live since 29 November 2021, covering roughly 3 square kilometres of the south-west of the city. It exists because nitrogen dioxide exceeded legal limits at two specific locations, the A3 Mile End Road and A3 Alfred Road.

Ocean Retail Park is not in it. We went to the council's own published list of postcodes inside the zone — the August 2024 version on cleanerairportsmouth.co.uk — and it lists sectors within PO1, PO2 and PO5 only. No PO3 postcode appears anywhere on that list, so neither PO3 5HH nor PO3 5NP is inside the zone.

And in a Class B zone, private cars and vans are not charged at all, wherever they drive. The charges fall on non-compliant taxis and private hire vehicles at £10 a day and on HGVs, buses, coaches and some larger DVLA-classified motorhomes at £50 a day, with a maximum of one charge per day. If you are driving a car to this retail park, the Clean Air Zone is simply not your problem. If you are driving a coach or a big motorhome anywhere near the city centre, it might be — the helpline is 0300 029 8888.

Toilets: plan ahead

There are no public toilets on the park. AccessAble states this explicitly. Customer toilets exist inside some of the retail units and that is the whole provision: there is no park-run facility and no Changing Places toilet. The operator names baby changing in the M&S Foodhall; Costa's own store page for its Ocean Retail Park branch separately lists baby changing, disabled access and disabled toilets, plus Wi-Fi, and says dogs are allowed. So in practice the Costa and the McDonald's are where you go. For a park of this size, with no park-provided toilet at all, it is worth knowing before you set out with small children.

Free Wi-Fi and a defibrillator

The operator publishes free Wi-Fi across the park and a defibrillator on site. It does not say where the defibrillator is, which rather limits its usefulness in an emergency.

Come by bike or by train if you can

Eleven minutes from the town centre by bike with racks outside Costa, or twenty minutes on foot from Hilsea station. Portsea Island is flat. On a Saturday in December the 600 spaces will not feel like enough.

Watch the parking clock

Parking is free and there are 600 spaces, but the park is camera-enforced and no maximum stay is published anywhere. That combination — free parking, ANPR cameras, unpublished time limit — is exactly the one that generates parking charge notices. Read the signage on arrival. If you are planning to leave the car here and walk somewhere else, do not.

Things nobody publishes

We could find no confirmation of cash machines, lockers, a lost property arrangement, a prayer or quiet room, quiet shopping hours, a dogs policy, a gift card, coach parking, a taxi rank or an on-site management office or telephone number. That does not mean none of these exist — it means the Crown Estate does not say so on any page we could read, and there is no other operator source to check. The only published telephone number is the Crown Estate's London switchboard, 020 7851 5000.

Not to be confused with

Ocean Plaza, Southport is a separate retail and leisure scheme in Merseyside with nothing to do with this park. Ocean Village is a marina development in Southampton. And Ocean Retail Centre — a name that appears on some mapping and review sites — is the same place as this park, not a second one.

How it got here

Nobody publishes when Ocean Retail Park opened. We looked for it in the operator's own pages, in Portsmouth City Council's planning and shopping-study documents, in the property trade press and in the local press, and it is not there. No opening year, no developer, no architect, no original anchor line-up. The earliest hard evidence we have that the park existed in its current form is a December 2004 Portsmouth shopping study prepared for the city council by Colliers CRE, which includes photographs of it — so it was plainly up and trading by then. That is as far as the record goes, and we would rather tell you that than guess at a decade.

The site itself is on reclaimed and industrial land on the north-eastern shoulder of Portsea Island, next to the Anchorage Park industrial and residential development, between the Eastern Road and the Copnor residential grid. That is the sort of ground on which British retail parks were built in bulk in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the park's original anchor mix — DIY, electricals, toys — fits that period exactly. But fitting a period is not the same as having a date, and we are not going to print one.

The 2011 purchase

The ownership story, by contrast, is clean. In May 2011 The Crown Estate bought Ocean Retail Park for £61m from The Junction fund, as part of a much larger push into retail warehousing — the Crown Estate's own head of regional portfolio at the time, James Cooksey, said the organisation had "invested over £260 million in retail warehousing in the last year, adding to our critical mass". The park was described in that coverage as 15,800 sq m of retail space let to Currys, Homebase, PC World and Toys R Us.

The Crown Estate still owns it, and it asset-manages it in-house. That is worth stating clearly because a great many retail parks are owned by one party and run by another; here the letting agents are Park Place Retail and Morgan Williams, but the asset manager named on the scheme particulars is the Crown Estate itself, and the asset managers quoted in the press coverage — Donna Springall in 2018, Richard Cripps in 2019 — are Crown Estate staff. We have seen no report of any sale since 2011.

The remaking of the tenant mix, 2017 to 2019

What the Crown Estate did with the park after buying it is the real history here, and it is a textbook case of what happened to British retail parks in the 2010s. Every one of the four anchors it bought in 2011 was in a sector that was about to be destroyed: DIY superstores, standalone electricals, and toy superstores. Homebase, PC World as a separate brand, and Toys R Us have all gone from the park.

What replaced them was the new orthodoxy: a discounter, a German supermarket, a value fashion operator, a toy retailer with a leaner model, a food hall and a run of homeware. TK Maxx, Tapi and Costa came first, followed by M&S Foodhall, Boots and Card Factory in spring 2018 — 22,200-plus sq ft between them — and then Lidl, B&M and Smyths, announced on 11 July 2019, with B&M opening 7 November and Smyths 9 November that year. The Homebase box was cut in two for B&M and Smyths; Lidl took Toys R Us.

Carpetright, Carphone Warehouse and Oak Furnitureland were all still listed here in 2019 and are all absent now. Carphone Warehouse's standalone estate was wound up nationally in 2020 and Carpetright collapsed into administration in 2024, so the park's losses since have been chains failing rather than a park failing. The park itself now has one small vacant unit out of sixteen.

What is not in the record

There is no listed building on or immediately adjoining the park that we could find, and no Historic England designation attaching to it. There is no published masterplan, no planning application for the 8,000 sq ft development plot that we could read, and no published statement of intent from the Crown Estate about the park's future. For a landlord that publishes a great deal about its offshore wind and its London estate, the retail parks are documented thinly.