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

A ten-unit retail park on the A30 at Babylon Hill, on the eastern edge of Yeovil, anchored by Next, Matalan, Boots, TK Maxx and Sports Direct. Two things nobody tells you: it has at least five different names, and although the address says Yeovil, Somerset, the ground it stands on is in Dorset. Here is what can actually be verified about it — and a blunt account of the unusually large amount that cannot, because the operator’s own website could not be reached from here at all.

Last checked 18 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

The Peel Centre sits on Babylon Hill, where Sherborne Road — the A30 — climbs out of Yeovil towards Sherborne, about a mile and a half from the town centre. It is a straightforward open retail park: a row of big boxes, a large surface car park in front, no roof over the middle. Next, Matalan, Boots, TK Maxx, Sports Direct, Argos, Pets at Home, Dreams and a Starbucks are the names on the units, and there is no supermarket, cinema or gym.

Start with the name, because there are five and all are in current use. Boots, Next, Matalan, TK Maxx and the NHS call it The Peel Centre; the letting agent calls it The Peel Shopping Park; Pets at Home’s own address says Peel Retail Park; Sports Direct’s says Babylon Retail Park; local coverage has used Babylon Hill retail park. The operator’s page is headed simply “Yeovil”. None is wrong; there is just no canonical name.

Then the county, which is the genuinely surprising bit. The postal address is Yeovil, Somerset, BA21 5BT, and Boots and the NHS both file the store under Somerset. But the site is over the boundary, and West Dorset’s own planners put it best in 2013: “the functional edge of Yeovil extends into West Dorset in an area known as Babylon Hill, which includes an out-of-town retail centre”. That is this park. South Somerset’s committee papers say it from the other side — the Peel Centre lies “within the administrative area of West Dorset District Council”, which is why South Somerset was consulted rather than deciding. West Dorset was abolished in 2019 and its functions passed to Dorset Council; a 2020 application here still carries a West Dorset reference, and Pets at Home files its Yeovil store under Dorset. So: Somerset address, Dorset ground.

Now the awkward part. The operator’s website, peelretailparks.co.uk, is real, indexed, and genuinely about this park — we checked from three directions. We could not read a word of it: the domain resolves, but every request was refused at the network layer before reaching the site. The Internet Archive was unavailable this week, and Peel L&P’s own site no longer resolves at all, taking its Yeovil leasing brochure with it. So there is no operator sourcing anywhere on this page — no park-wide hours, no parking rules, no landlord’s directory, no phone number. What follows comes from council papers, the letting particulars, Companies House and the retailers’ own store pages. Where sources disagree — and here they disagree about the floor area, the parking and the number of units — we print both and say who published each.

The town of Yeovil is about 4 miles to the west of Sherborne, just inside the boundary of Somerset. The functional edge of Yeovil extends into West Dorset in an area known as Babylon Hill, which includes an out-of-town retail centre.

The essentials

Opening times

There is no park-wide opening time here, because none exists that we could read. Every time in the table above is a named retailer’s own store page, checked on 18 September 2026.

The good news is that three of them agree. Next, Matalan and Sports Direct independently publish Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm and Saturday 9am to 7pm. Three unconnected national retailers landing on the same weekday pattern is about as close to a park standard as you get without the landlord saying so. Treat it as the working assumption and the individual rows as the facts.

Three exceptions worth knowing. Next opens at 8am on Saturdays, an hour before the rest. Sunday is not uniform: Next and Matalan trade 10am to 4pm, Sports Direct 10.30am to 4.30pm — England’s Sunday trading rules cap large stores at six hours, which is why nobody does more. And Dreams keeps its own timetable: 10am to 6pm most days, 7pm on Tuesdays, from 9am on Saturdays. Do not turn up for it at 9am on a Monday.

The Boots row is a genuine conflict and we are not resolving it. The NHS and the National Pharmacy Network both list the Unit 7 pharmacy as trading until 9pm Monday to Saturday, closing for an hour at lunch. That is an hour later than every other tenant and an odd pattern for a retail park. They are pharmacy-counter hours rather than shop hours, and boots.com refused our requests, so we could not check the store times against them. If you need the pharmacy after 8pm, ring 01935 434621 first.

No bank holiday, Christmas or Easter hours are published for this park by anyone at all — not the operator, not the agent, not the tenants beyond Sports Direct’s generic warning that they may differ.

Getting there

By road

Use BA21 5BT. The park fronts the A30 Sherborne Road at Babylon Hill, on the climb out of Yeovil towards Sherborne. There is no motorway junction on this page, deliberately: there is no motorway anywhere near Yeovil. The nearest strategic roads are the A30, the A37, the A3088 and the A303 to the north. The operator publishes no directions we could read, so there is nothing to quote and nothing to invent.

Which edge of town? The sources disagree. The letting particulars put the park “on the east side of Yeovil fronting the A30”, about 1.5 miles south-east of the town centre; South Somerset’s 2010 report put it “on the southern edge of Yeovil off the A30”. Babylon Hill is east of the town on the Sherborne road, so the agent matches the map better — but we are not overruling a council report, and both get you to the same roundabout.

Parking

Parking is free — and the source is not the landlord but AccessAble, whose surveyed guide to the Next store states that “parking is free for all users” and records a flat tarmac car park. It is the only survey of this car park anybody publishes.

What nobody publishes is a maximum stay. Parks like this usually have one, enforced by camera, and a 2016 local headline about “parking trouble at Babylon Hill retail park” suggests there was an enforcement story here — but that page no longer loads, no contractor is named by anyone, and we will not print a limit we have not seen. Read the signs on arrival.

The space count comes three ways: “over 560” in the letting particulars, 532 in the agent’s own parking field on the same page, and 533 in the December 2010 council report, which added that the proposed fifth unit would take 24 away. No height restriction is published. No coach parking, taxi rank or cycle parking could be confirmed. And there is no EV charging: Zapmap lists ten public charging locations across Yeovil and none is here. Charge before you come.

By train

Yeovil has two stations, Yeovil Junction and Yeovil Pen Mill, and neither is at the park. No walking distance or time from either is published by the operator, the rail companies or anyone else, so we will not estimate one. Plan on a bus or a taxi rather than a walk up Babylon Hill on the A30, which is a fast main road on a gradient.

By bus

No bus stop at the park is published by anyone. What we can confirm is that buses run past it: First Bus’s Y4 between Yeovil and Sherborne uses the A30 over Babylon Hill — a 2023 notice about an overnight closure of “Babylon Hill A30” sets out the diversion the Y4 had to take. Whether it calls at the park itself we could not establish. Check the current Somerset network before relying on a bus.

Accessibility

There is exactly one proper access guide for anything here, and it covers one shop. AccessAble’s guide to the Next store records five Blue Badge bays at 350cm by 500cm on tarmac with a 120cm hatched zone, step-free access at the entrance, a 172cm door opening with double doors held permanently open under a canopy, and step-free access throughout. It also records no public toilets and no accessible toilet inside that store.

Sports Direct lists staff assistance, wheelchair access, hearing loops and disabled parking at Unit 5, and Matalan lists wheelchair access and disabled parking. Beyond that nothing park-wide is published — no toilets, Changing Places, Shopmobility, wheelchair hire, baby changing or quiet hours, and no park-wide access guide. If any of those decide your trip, phone the shop you are heading for.

The shops

Ten stores on the ukmalls directory, eleven units on the agent’s record with two marketed as vacant. The names, as at 18 September 2026:

• Next — Unit 6, the biggest draw and the only tenant with a published access guide
• Matalan
• TK Maxx — Unit 2
• Sports Direct — Unit 5, which its own store page says includes a Game store, a name that appears on neither the operator’s nor the agent’s list
• Boots — Unit 7, with a pharmacy
• Argos — Unit 4
• Pets at Home — Unit 9, with Vets4Pets and grooming. Directories still call the vet practice Companion Care, its former brand.
• Dreams
• Starbucks

Units 1, 3, 8, 10 and 11 are not individually attributed by any source we read. Unit 1 is one of the two vacancies, at 10,000 sq ft; the other is a 12,000 sq ft “Development A”.

Arrivals and departures: there are none on the record

We could not source a single dated arrival or departure for any tenant here, ever. No letting announcement, no opening date, no closure date, for any of the ten or eleven names. Peel Retail Parks issues releases about its other parks — Gloucester, Straiton, Trafford, Sunderland, Blackburn — and appears never to have issued one about Yeovil. That is the finding, and it is worth stating rather than padding around.

The only dated retail event on the public record is the 2010 application for a fifth non-food unit of 600 sq m gross and 500 sq m net tradable. The park had four units then and has ten or eleven now, so it clearly grew — by how much, in what order and under which consents, nobody says. One caution: Argos. It is still listed at Unit 4 and we found no report of it closing, but we could not confirm it from Argos’s own store finder either. Do not make a special trip without ringing.

Useful to know

Which Peel Centre?

There are at least four other “Peel Centres” in Britain, because Peel has used the name repeatedly. We have separate pages for another Peel Centre and for the Peel Centre at Gloucester, and there is a third at Barnsley. A wholly unrelated Peel Centre in Bracknell, Berkshire, has its own access guide under Bracknell Forest Council — which, unhelpfully, also has a Yeovil Road. A further Peel Centre at Colindale in north London is a police establishment. If a search result names any council other than Dorset or Somerset, it is not this park.

And which Yeovil park?

Yeovil has more out-of-town retail than its size suggests, on opposite sides of town, and the figures get mixed up constantly.

• This one — the Peel Centre, Babylon Hill on the A30, east, BA21 5BT, about 109,000 sq ft.
• Houndstone Retail Park, BA22 8YQ, on the west side, 149,951 sq ft across 12 units with The Range, Currys, Oak Furnitureland and Hobbycraft, next to a 55,000 sq ft Asda. Houndstone is the bigger of the two. It shares a letting agent with the Peel Centre; we did not establish its owner, and none of the figures on this page belong to it.
• Lysander Retail Park, Lysander Road, BA20 2BT — a third scheme, also on the west side, near Morrisons, with B&M and Screwfix nearby. The Peel Centre is not on Lysander Road, and anyone who says it is has merged two schemes at opposite ends of town.
• Yeovil town centre — the Quedam and Glovers Walk, the latter bought by Somerset Council under its Yeovil Refresh programme. Nothing to do with Peel.

If the ten shops here are not enough, the two obvious bigger trips from Yeovil are Clarks Village at Street, the outlet village to the north, and Hankridge Farm at Taunton to the west. Both are considerably larger propositions than Babylon Hill.

You will also see this park’s address written as “Yeovil Retail Park, Babylon Hill” on one directory. No other source uses that name and no separate scheme of it exists as far as we can tell — treat it as a sixth loose label for the same place.

Two Dorset retail studies do not mention it

The park sits in what was West Dorset, yet the Joint Town Centre Retail and Leisure Study prepared by CB Richard Ellis for West Dorset and Weymouth & Portland in December 2008 never names it — Yeovil appears once as a shopping-venue rank and once as the place that “expenditure particularly from Zone 7 Sherborne leaks to”. The Joint Retail and Commercial Leisure Study by Carter Jonas, March 2018, does not mention the Peel Centre, Babylon Hill or a Yeovil retail park at all. A 109,000 sq ft park inside the district, absent from both of its own council’s retail evidence studies, is a gap in the record rather than in the park.

Practical notes

There is no park phone number. The useful ones are the shops’ own: Boots 01935 434621, Pets at Home 01935 706880, Dreams 01935 676277, Sports Direct 0344 332 5269. Matalan publishes only its national line. We could find no confirmation of toilets, cash machines, Wi-Fi, lost property, a dogs policy or a gift card here — which does not mean none exists, only that nobody publishes it.

How it got here

Nobody publishes when this park opened. Two passes across the operator, the letting agents, both councils’ committee papers, Companies House and the trade press produced no opening year and no developer name. We are not going to guess, and if you see a date quoted elsewhere, ask where it came from.

The earliest hard date on the record is 1 December 2010, when South Somerset District Council’s Area South Committee considered West Dorset’s consultation on an application for a fifth non-food retail unit — West Dorset reference 1/D/10/001735, South Somerset reference 10/04594/OLAC, 600 sq m gross internal and 500 sq m net tradable. The report records that the park then had four units and 533 parking spaces.

The interesting part is the politics. South Somerset had no power to decide the application, because the site is in West Dorset — it was a consultee on its neighbour’s decision about a retail park a mile and a half from its own town centre. Its officers recorded their concerns as “the impact of an additional retail unit on the viability and vitality of Yeovil Town Centre and any traffic implications”, and issued a holding objection. What West Dorset then decided is not published anywhere we could read. A later application, WD/D/20/000431 at “3 Peel Centre Retail Park, Babylon Hill”, still under the West Dorset prefix in 2020, could not be read either.

The ownership chain

The 2010 report names the owner as Peel Investments (Intermediate) Ltd. Companies House shows that company alive and well: incorporated on 6 February 2008 as De Facto 1588 Limited, renamed to its Peel name later that month, and renamed again to Peel L&P Investments (Intermediate) Limited in February 2020. Company number 06495548, active, registered at the Venus Building, 1 Old Park Lane, Trafford City, Manchester M41 7HA — the Peel Group’s own front door. Completely Retail names the landlord more loosely as “Peel Holdings and Peel Retail Parks”.

The Peel Group describes itself as “a family-owned investment enterprise”. Its retail arm, Peel Retail Parks, is the operator, and a 2019 release listed the ten parks it owns and manages as Barnsley, Blackburn, Bristol, Edinburgh, Corby, Gloucester, Trafford, Stockport, Sunderland and Yeovil. No sale of the Yeovil park has ever been reported. Those corporate dates are incorporation and renaming dates and nothing more — not the date the park opened, not the date Peel bought it.

A website that has gone

peellandp.co.uk no longer resolves. Peel L&P’s own site is gone, taking with it the Yeovil leasing one-pager still sitting in search indexes and leaving the contact email published for this park — a.jolley@peellandp.co.uk — on a dead domain. peelretailparks.co.uk and peel.co.uk both still resolve. We are not inferring a corporate restructure from a dead domain, and nobody has announced one. It is simply a fact about researching this park in 2026: the landlord’s paper trail is thinner than it was.