The Peel Centre, Gloucester: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 163,788 sq ft retail park on St Ann Way, directly across the road from the Gloucester Quays outlet centre, with Next, Home Bargains, Hobbycraft, Buzz Bingo and a nine-court padel club in the old Toys R Us. Two things to know before you go: parking is free for two hours and then it is £100, and parking here to walk across to the Quays is exactly what the £100 is for. Here is what the landlord publishes, what it does not, and why this park answers to three different names.

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

The Peel Centre sits on St Ann Way, off Bristol Road, less than half a mile south of Gloucester city centre and immediately across the road from the Gloucester Quays designer outlet. It is a conventional open-fronted retail park of around thirteen units — beds, crafts, a discount store, a frozen-food warehouse, a Next, a bingo hall, a Burger King — on a site that until 2013 also held the city's six-screen multiplex.

Start with the car park, because it is what catches people out. Parking is free for up to two hours. After that — or if you park here and walk across St Ann Way to the outlet centre — the site's operator, Ocean Parking, issues a £100 parking charge notice. The landlord is open about why: its own associate director calls the Peel Centre "one of very few free car parks in the city centre, all of which are 'customer only'". More than seventy signs on site say so. It is less a trap than a rule most people have not read, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

The second thing is the name. This one park answers to three of them. The road signs, the retailers' own store addresses and the council's planning documents call it the Peel Centre. The body copy on the landlord's own web page calls it Gloucester Retail Park. And the address line at the top of that same page calls it Gloucester Quays Retail Park — which is a genuinely unhelpful thing to call a park that is not the Gloucester Quays outlet centre and is not owned in the same vehicle. We have used "the Peel Centre" throughout because that is what is written on the ground.

There are also two other Peel Centres in Britain and neither is this one. The Peel Centre in Bracknell — 168,000 sq ft, with a Home Bargains, just like Gloucester — was sold by Landsec to Hines Global Income Trust for £49m in June 2025, and that has nothing to do with Gloucester. A third Peel Centre, in Stockport, is confusingly in the same operator's portfolio. Check the postcode before you believe any figure.

What follows comes from the landlord's own leasing page, Gloucester City Council's planning documents, the local press, two retailers' own store pages and Cinema Treasures' record of the multiplex that stood here. Where sources differ — and on parking spaces they differ by nearly four hundred — we print both and say who published each. Where nobody publishes something, and here that includes the opening hours, we say so.

The Peel Centre is one of very few free car parks in the city centre, all of which are 'customer only'.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on 13 September 2026. The owner publishes no opening hours for this park at all, on any page. That is not us failing to find them. Peel Retail Parks' Gloucester page is a leasing document aimed at retailers — it gives floor areas, the planning consent and two agents' email addresses — and there is no shopper-facing website for the Peel Centre anywhere. The address gloucesterquaysretailpark.co.uk exists in search results but returned a 500 error on its home page and a 404 on its contact page when we tried it.

So the operator cannot contradict itself on hours, because it never states any. At a retail park that matters less than at an enclosed mall — there is no shared door to be locked — but it does mean the only hours that exist are the retailers' own, and they do not match. Next trades until 8pm on weekdays; Dreams shuts at 6pm and does not open until 10am. One trip for two shops: check both.

We have used only the retailers' own store pages. A dozen opening-times aggregators carry Peel Centre hours and we have printed nothing from any of them — unattributed scrapes, one openly labelled a "2019 update". Hobbycraft's own store page loaded but its store details panel did not render, so its hours are left out rather than guessed. No bank holiday, Christmas or New Year hours exist from any source.

Getting there

By road — and no, we are not giving you a junction number

Use GL1 5SF. The landlord publishes no motorway junction and we are not inventing one. Its entire road guidance is that the park is "situated on the A4301 inner ring road, less than half a mile south of Gloucester City Centre". For a site on a ring road half a mile from a city centre that is reasonable — the ring road is what you follow, not a motorway slip.

The park fronts St Ann Way and backs onto the Bristol Road corridor, which is why some particulars give the address as "St Ann Way, Bristol Road". Gloucester Quays is directly opposite; Sainsbury's is adjacent.

Parking — read this bit properly

Parking is free for up to two hours, enforced by Ocean Parking, with a £100 charge for overstaying. It is also customer-only, enforced in the way that catches people out: park at the Peel Centre and walk across St Ann Way to the Gloucester Quays outlet and you are in breach. That is what the regime was changed to stop.

The landlord is straightforward about it. Adam Jolley, Associate Director at Peel L&P, told Gloucester BID that "the Peel Centre is one of very few free car parks in the city centre, all of which are 'customer only'", that "the decision to restrict parking has been well-received locally across social media", and that "ahead of the new regime being implemented, Ocean Parking carried out weeks of manned patrols to raise awareness". Ocean Parking says it raised signage to more than 70 signs and ran a two-week challenge period first. Visit Gloucester, the city's tourism board, independently states a maximum two-hour stay.

How many spaces there are is genuinely unclear. Peel's own page says 1,250. The planning statement for the proposed Starbucks drive-thru, reported in January 2024, worked from 855 spaces, reducing to 810 once the drive-thru took 74 of them. Nobody reconciles the gap of nearly four hundred. No height restriction is published by anyone either; it is a surface car park rather than a deck, but nobody states a limit.

By train

Gloucester station is the railhead. No walking distance or time from the station is published by anybody — not the landlord, not the train operator, not the tourism board. A real gap for a site this close to the city centre, and we would rather flag it than invent a figure.

By bus

Nothing. No route number, no stop name, no bus operator is published for this park by any source we could find. For one half a mile from a city centre, next to a major outlet centre, that is a surprising hole. The Quays across the road is well served, but we could not source a stop serving the Peel Centre specifically.

On foot

The only walking distances published for the site come from Visit Gloucester, and they are to attractions rather than transport: the National Waterways Museum 0.27 miles, Gloucester Docks 0.32 miles, Gloucester Park 0.35 miles. The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal runs alongside — the Next store was built to overlook it — but no source describes a cycle route or towpath access, and no cycle parking, coach parking or taxi rank could be confirmed.

The shops

The landlord's schedule names eight tenants with floor areas; Completely Retail counts about thirteen units. Two more occupiers — a Costa drive-thru and a padel centre — are on site but absent from that schedule, which tells you how far to trust any single list.

The tenant schedule, with the landlord's own floor areas

• Buzz Bingo — 25,188 sq ft, the largest named unit
• Home Bargains — 21,000 sq ft
• Next — 18,500 sq ft
• The Food Warehouse (Iceland) — 12,851 sq ft
• Hobbycraft — 10,132 sq ft
• Dreams — 8,587 sq ft
• Bensons for Beds — 7,550 sq ft
• Burger King — 4,511 sq ft

Plus a Costa drive-thru, which appears in the planning papers rather than on the schedule, and The Padel Club.

One oddity if you are cross-checking lists: the landlord says Buzz Bingo, but Completely Retail and ARC Retail both still say Gala Bingo. Buzz is the rebranded Gala; two agents have not updated the fascia name. It is one hall, not two.

The planning consent, in Peel's own words, is "bulky goods with individual relaxations including toys, sportswear, footwear, and leisure/food uses" — which is why the mix runs to beds and crafts rather than fashion, and why the leisure uses needed those relaxations.

The padel saga: two operators, one unit, and the first deal died

The former Toys R Us box — 43,000 sq ft, Unit 1 — is the biggest story on this park, and it took two goes to fill.

On 6 October 2023 the letting was announced: We Are Padel, a Swedish operator, taking the whole unit. Russell Homer, Senior Director Out Of Town Retail at CBRE, put it on record, writing that he was "pleased to have advised CBRE UK retained client Peel Land & Property Group on the leasing transaction of Unit 1, Peel Centre Retail Park, Gloucester to WAP- We Are Padel".

Then on 13 May 2024 a different company announced a different padel venue for Gloucester: The Padel Club, of Wilmslow, promising nine premium indoor panoramic courts by that October. Its founder and chief executive, Kris Ball, said: "Our club is already designed (it's going to be a game changer) and we're ready to fit out nine premium indoor panoramic courts very soon, with a goal of being open by October." The same report noted that the We Are Padel scheme had not materialised.

The Padel Club is the one that opened, in the former Toys R Us unit here: nine indoor courts, a shop, a restaurant, a bar and a clubhouse, on a £1 million investment, its first site in the South West. Bruce Edmondson, Development Director for Peel Retail and Leisure, said Peel was "incredibly excited to welcome The Padel Club to Gloucester Retail Park".

What is not published is when it opened. The announcement carries no date, and a second local report of the same story would not load for us, so we are not attaching one. Nor did We Are Padel ever trade here as far as any source says — the May 2024 report says the opposite.

Next, and the £14m rebuild of the cinema site

The current Next is why one end of the park looks newer. Peel spent £14 million redeveloping the multiplex site, with Midas Construction as contractor. The store was to be 28,000 sq ft over two mezzanine floors, clad in stone and glass with an atrium overlooking the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, creating 100 jobs. The structure was finished in autumn 2018 and the store opened in spring 2019, replacing Next's Gloucester store at Quedgeley. Mark Whittaker, then Group Property Director at Peel Land and Property, said Next would "bring the 'wow factor' to the retail park, ultimately helping to widen the appeal of the city attracting more people to Gloucester".

The floor area is disputed and we are not resolving it. That 28,000 sq ft comes from the coverage of the new store; Peel's own current schedule says 18,500 sq ft. Ground floor versus total with the mezzanines is the obvious explanation, but nobody says so, so both are printed.

A Starbucks that may or may not exist

In January 2024 a drive-thru Starbucks was proposed for the park, next to the former cinema and near the existing Costa drive-thru. The planning statement, by Alder King Planning Consultants, called it "an ancillary food and drink service facility" for retail park customers. It sought 6am to 11pm trading, expected about 10 full-time and 10 part-time jobs, and would take 74 existing spaces while providing 37 standard bays, two disabled bays and an order waiting bay.

We could not establish whether it was approved, built or opened. No planning reference appears in any coverage. Do not plan a coffee around it.

What has gone

Two departures are on the record and only one has a date we trust. Toys R Us is gone — the unit is "the former Toys R Us" in Peel's own evidence to the local plan examination and in the local press — but no closure date for the Gloucester store is published anywhere, and we have deliberately not borrowed the date of the chain's national collapse. Cineworld is gone, and its date is disputed; see the history section.

Beyond those two, nobody publishes closures at this park. No local-press round-up, no landlord statement. A directory listing survives for a Stead & Simpson at The Peel Centre, GL1 5SF, which suggests the shoe chain traded here at some point, but it is undated and no closure was reported, so we log it as a lead rather than write it up.

Useful to know

The two-hour rule, once more

If you take one thing from this page: two hours free, then £100, and you may not park here and walk to the Quays. Over seventy signs say so, and Ocean Parking ran manned patrols and a two-week challenge period before switching to charges. Two hours is plenty for a bed showroom and a Home Bargains. It is not plenty for an afternoon that drifts across the road.

Do not confuse this park with Gloucester Quays

Gloucester Quays, across St Ann Way, is a separate scheme with separate figures. It opened on 30 May 2009 at a cost of £248m, had 40 stores then and around 51 now, and its footfall and trading numbers are widely reported. None of them belong to the Peel Centre. The two share an operator and a postcode district and get blended constantly — even TripAdvisor files reviews of "The Peel Centre Retail Park" under Gloucester Quays. We have a separate page on Gloucester Quays.

Almost nothing about facilities is published, and that is the finding

Because there is no shopper-facing website for this park, there is no accessibility page, no toilets page and no facilities page. We could not confirm, for the park as a whole: toilets, baby changing, a Changing Places toilet, Shopmobility, wheelchair or scooter hire, cash machines, free Wi-Fi, lost property, a customer services desk, a quiet hour, a prayer room, lockers, gift cards or a dogs policy. No AccessAble guide and no Euan's Guide listing for the park could be retrieved.

What is confirmed is thin: Dreams' own store page states disabled access; the Starbucks application would provide two disabled bays; Next's store lists cafes, a Costa Ground counter and Click & Collect. That does not mean the rest is absent — a park with a Next this size and a bingo hall will have toilets — only that nobody publishes it. If one of those decides your trip, ring the individual shop: there is no on-site number, and the 0161 number is Peel's Manchester head office.

Getting more out of one trip

The park sits on the edge of Gloucester Docks, which is why its published walking distances are all to museums. Nothing stops you visiting both the Peel Centre and the Quays in one outing — you simply cannot do it on one car park. Park at whichever you are actually shopping at.

Other places in the same direction

If the bulky-goods mix is not what you are after, the nearest big comparison-shopping destinations are Cotswolds Designer Outlet to the north and, to the south, Cabot Circus, The Mall at Cribbs Causeway and the adjoining Cribbs Causeway Retail Park and The Venue.

Clean air zones

No clean-air or low-emission zone affecting St Ann Way appears in any source we read.

How it got here

Nobody publishes an opening date for this retail park. Not the landlord, not the council, not the local press. The park's own birthday is not on the record anywhere we could reach.

What is on the record, precisely, is the cinema. A six-screen multiplex with 1,682 seats — the largest screen 362, the smallest 234 — opened here as the Cannon on 14 December 1990, a Cineplex Odeon project, at St Ann Way, Bristol Road, GL1 5SF. That is the hard floor for the park's age. The multiplex then went through almost every fascia the British cinema industry produced: MGM in 1995, Virgin in July 1995, UGC in October 1999, Cineworld in November 2005.

Its closing date is disputed by six years and we are not picking one. Cinema Treasures records 5 December 2013, the day before Cineworld opened a new ten-screen cinema inside the Gloucester Quays outlet centre across the road — a one-day handover, the sort of detail that reads true. The local press, writing later about the site's redevelopment, said 2007. Both are printed because nobody reconciles them. We will say this much for the later date without treating it as settled: the council's 2011 health check still described the park as having "a cinema" and as "subject to a planning application for a change of use to retail from cinema", which is hard to square with a building shut for four years.

That same 2011 council document is the clearest official description of what this place is. It records that "the Peel Centre adjoins Gloucester Quays and provides a retail warehouse park together with a cinema and food/drink units", and notes separately that "a Sainsburys store is located at the St Ann's Way". The Peel Centre is not designated as a district or local centre in the city's planning framework — it is out-of-centre retail, and it is assessed as such.

The cinema's departure set up the park's one big rebuild. Peel put £14 million into the site with Midas Construction, delivering the new Next — structure complete autumn 2018, store open spring 2019 — and intending to refurbish the former cinema building itself as retail units along the western side. That plan changed. By January 2024 the former Cineworld was described in planning documents as being converted to self-storage. The retail units along the western side did not happen in the form announced.

Ownership has been stable throughout, as far as anyone has reported. The park is owned by Peel L&P — Peel Land and Property Group, part of The Peel Group — and managed under the Peel Retail Parks brand, which runs seven parks: Barnsley, Gloucester, Hyndburn, Stockport, Straiton, Washington and Yeovil. CBRE, announcing the 2023 padel letting, named Peel Land & Property Group as its "retained client": an agent identifying its own landlord, which is about as good as this kind of evidence gets. Peel has also appeared in its own name at the Gloucester local plan examination, through consultants Tetra Tech, arguing that the Peel Centre is "materially better connected and significantly more accessible in relation to Gloucester city centre" than a rival out-of-centre site on Eastern Avenue — an advocate's sentence in a planning fight rather than neutral description, but it tells you how the owner positions the park.

No sale of this park has ever been reported. No price, no yield, no percentage stake, no buyer, no seller. The operating company was re-incorporated as Peel Retail and Leisure Group UK Limited (16236161) on 7 February 2025, but that is a group reorganisation at the Venus Building in TraffordCity, not a Gloucester transaction. Which Peel entity holds the freehold title to GL1 5SF we could not establish.

One last note for anyone searching. The £49m sale of "the Peel Centre" by Landsec to Hines Global Income Trust, completing in June 2025, was Bracknell — 168,000 sq ft, also with a Home Bargains, uncomfortably easy to mistake for this one. The Peel Centre in Stockport is a third park, in the same operator's portfolio. Check the postcode every time.