Queens Shopping Park, Stafford: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 15-unit out-of-town park on the south-east edge of Stafford, anchored by Next and a two-floor TK Maxx that arrived in May 2025, with free parking and a Greggs that opens at half six in the morning. Two warnings first. It is also called Queens Retail Park — same place — and it is in STAFFORD, not Preston and not Nottingham, both of which have a "Queens" park of their own. Its own website could not be reached from here at all, so everything below comes from the landlord’s agent, from the shops themselves and from the local press, and we say which is which.

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

Queens Shopping Park sits on the south-east side of Stafford, in the Queensville area, where Old Rickerscote Lane meets Silkmore Lane. The postcode is ST17 4SU. It is a conventional open-air retail park — a terrace of large boxes round a free car park — anchored by Next and Next Home, with TK Maxx, Boots, Pets at Home, Matalan, HomeSense, New Look, Asda Living, Mountain Warehouse, Home Bargains, Oak Furniture Land, Greggs and a Buzz Bingo filling out the rest.

The name first, because it will catch you out. This one park answers to four names in live use. The operator’s own website calls it Queens Shopping Park, and so do Next, TK Maxx, Greggs, AccessAble and the letting agents. But Boots, Home Bargains, Asda, the Express & Star, the 2008 deal records and most of the internet call it Queens Retail Park; the operator’s hours page is titled simply Queens Shopping; and Stafford Borough Council, on an advertisement consent for Unit 2, calls it Queensville Retail Park. All the same car park.

And it is in Stafford. There is a Queens Retail Park in Preston and a Queens Drive Retail Park in Nottingham, and neither has anything to do with this one. Nor is this Riverside Stafford, the Guildhall and Greyfriars in the town centre, or Friary Green Retail Park across town. Separate places, separately owned.

Now the awkward part. The park’s own website, queensstafford.co.uk, is genuinely the right address — its pages are indexed and titled for this park, including a dedicated opening-times page — but every attempt to read it failed at the network layer. Not a dead domain, not a robots block, not a JavaScript problem: our requests never reached the site. So there is no operator sourcing anywhere here. Everything below comes from the landlord’s agent listing, from shops’ own store pages, from an AccessAble survey and from the Express & Star, and every figure carries the name of whoever published it.

That has two useful consequences. Building the hours out of separate shops’ own times tells you what a park-wide banner never would: Greggs opens at 6.30am, Home Bargains at 8am, Next and Asda Living at 9am, and on a Sunday the big units shut at half four on the dot. And checking tenants one by one rather than trusting the agent’s list showed that the landlord’s own listing is a year out of date.

We also have long term intentions to improve the site and make further investment in the retail park.

The essentials

Opening times

There is no operator-published opening time on this page because we could not obtain one. The operator maintains a dedicated opening-times page at queensstafford.co.uk — it is indexed and titled — and every attempt to read it failed before the request reached the site. Rather than guess, we have built the table out of tenants’ own published times, each labelled with the shop and the source. All were checked on 13 September 2026.

Sunday is where three separate sources agree. Next, Asda Living and Home Bargains all close at 4.30pm on Sunday. That is England’s six-hour Sunday trading limit doing its work on the large units, and it means the park is effectively finished by half four whatever time you set off. Greggs, small enough to trade freely, is the outlier at 9am to 5pm.

The festive hours in the table belong to one shop. Home Bargains is the only tenant on the park publishing a Christmas schedule. No park-wide festive or bank holiday hours are published by anybody.

Getting there

By road — and why there is no junction number here

Use ST17 4SU. We are not printing a motorway junction, and that is deliberate. The operator’s website is the party that would properly publish one and it could not be read; no third party names one either. Stafford sits between two M6 junctions, and the wrong one puts you on the wrong side of the town with the river and the railway in between.

What we can give you is the letting agent’s own description, which is more precise than a junction number anyway. Completely Retail places the park "on the south-east side of Stafford in a prominent and accessible location near to the roundabout junction of Queensville Bridge (A513) and Silkmore Lane" — a named A-road and a named roundabout, and how you will actually find it.

Two street names, one park

Do not be thrown if two shops give different streets. Old Rickerscote Lane is on the Next, TK Maxx, Home Bargains and agent listings; Silkmore Lane on the Asda, Greggs and council records. The frontage runs between them; the postcode is ST17 4SU on every version.

Parking

Parking is free. That comes from AccessAble, whose surveyors visited in person and recorded that "parking is free for all users" and that the car park is a shared facility rather than Next’s own — so it is about the Queens car park, not one shop’s bays.

What nobody publishes is how long you may stay. There is no stated maximum stay, no named ANPR operator and no enforcement company anywhere in the public record here. Nor is there a published space count: the only quantity we found was a LoopNet ratio of 8.5 spaces per 1,000 sq ft, which is a marketing figure and not a number of bays. There is no published height restriction either. Read the signs when you arrive, and if you are driving something tall, judge the entrance on the day.

By train and bus

Stafford station is the town’s railhead. No source publishes a walking distance or time from it to Queens — not the operator, not the rail companies, not the council. The park is on the south-east edge of town and the station is not, so this is not a short walk, but we will not put a figure on it that nobody has published.

We could not source a single bus route number. Queens has a Moovit journey-planner page, which would carry the routes, and it robots-blocked us; the operator’s getting-here page could not be reached. Rather than name a service we have not checked, we are telling you plainly that this is a gap — check the county council bus map first. Nothing is published about coach parking, a taxi rank or cycle stands either.

The shops

The list below comes from British Land’s own agent-facing portfolio listing on Completely Retail, corrected against the tenants’ own store pages — a correction that matters, since the agent listing still shows a Hobbycraft that shut a year ago.

The anchors, with floor areas

• Next and Next Home — 25,000 sq ft. The long-standing anchor, over two floors with a lift; store number 0507. It holds Costa and Victoria’s Secret concessions, which are departments within Next rather than separate units, and we have not counted them.
• TK Maxx — 16,538 sq ft over two floors (the figure in its own opening announcement) or 11,823 sq ft (the agent listing). Both are printed because nothing reconciles them.
• Boots — 10,035 sq ft
• Pets at Home — 10,035 sq ft
• Buzz Bingo — 10,028 sq ft
• Mountain Warehouse — 9,976 sq ft

The rest of the line-up

Listed by the agent without floor areas: New Look, HomeSense, Asda Living and Matalan. Trading here and confirmed from their own store pages but absent from the agent list: Greggs (unit U14), Home Bargains (store A881) and Oak Furniture Land (Unit 2). A Cancer Research UK superstore also appears at this address on the Charity Retail Association’s register, though we could not open the entry to confirm it.

TK Maxx: a dated arrival, and a unit number that does not add up

TK Maxx opened at Queens on Thursday 22 May 2025 at 10am, per the Express & Star, which reported it the day before. It was a relocation from Friary Green Retail Park elsewhere in Stafford, existing staff were offered transfers, and the store was given as 16,538 sq ft over two floors.

Here is the oddity. TK Maxx’s own store page and the Express & Star both put it in Unit 11A. Next’s own live store page also gives its address as 11A Queens Shopping Park. Two retailers, two of their own websites, one unit number, and nothing published settles it — the unit may have been subdivided, or one store page may simply be stale. Directory sites also still carry a dead "TK Maxx, Unit 3, Friary Green Retail Park" entry.

Hobbycraft has gone, and the landlord’s listing has not noticed

The Hobbycraft at Unit 4B closed in September 2025. Two independent sources published it in mid-August 2025 — the Express & Star and Retail Gazette — both naming Stafford. It was part of a restructuring at Hobbycraft, bought by the private equity firm Modella Capital in August 2024: six shops closed that September on top of twelve already gone, eighteen in all, in a plan the company said would "secure the future of at least 99 of its stores and 1,800 jobs across the business".

Hobbycraft is still listed as a tenant on the landlord’s agent page as we write. Worth knowing beyond this one shop: an agent’s listing is a good guide to who owns a park and an unreliable guide to who trades there.

The other dated arrival

The only other opening date we could source comes, as so often, from a builder rather than a retailer. Stainforth Construction’s own project page records that it fitted out Unit 2 for Oak Furniture Land, which opened on 27 August 2018.

What else has gone — and why we will not date any of it

The Express & Star’s 2008 report named the tenants of the day: Stafford Sport Arenas, Matalan, Dunelm, Instores, Carpetright, Pets at Home and Gala Bingo. Matalan and Pets at Home are still here, and Gala Bingo is still here under a different sign — Buzz Bingo is the national rebrand of Gala, not a new tenant. An undated directory snapshot from roughly 2017 adds a B&M Home Store.

Not one of those departures has a published date. All the comparison proves is that they traded here at one date and not at another. Some of those chains have had national troubles since; some simply moved. We will not imply we know which.

Elsewhere in the region

If you are comparing parks in the area, we have also written up Affinity Staffordshire at Talke, Telford Forge Shopping Park and The Fort Shopping Park in Birmingham.

Useful to know

Accessibility — the one properly surveyed source, faults and all

There is no park-wide accessibility statement anywhere. What does exist is an AccessAble guide to the Next store, and AccessAble send surveyors in person rather than reprinting what a venue tells them. It covers the car park and the inside of Next.

The car park comes out well. Open-air, tarmac, free for all users, with ten or more blue badge bays of 250cm by 500cm, each with a 120cm hatched buffer zone — the detail that matters if you use a wheelchair or a hoist, and one a surprising number of parks lack. Marked parent-and-child bays too.

Inside Next, both entrances are step-free with double-width automatic doors — 200cm clear opening on the womenswear side, 198cm on the home side — and a lift about 25 metres in serves both floors, with visual and audible indicators, Braille markings and a 120cm door.

And now the faults, which a promotional page would leave out. AccessAble records the first-floor accessible toilet as 150cm by 230cm and failing the 150cm by 150cm turning-space standard, with no non-slip flooring and the emergency alarm cord out of reach. It does have a dropdown rail, grab rails both sides, a lever flush, a 74cm basin and a baby-changing table. The surveyors also flagged the security barriers and dark floor markings at both entrances as features that could be perceived as hazards.

No Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility scheme and no wheelchair hire is recorded for this park by any source. Nor are there any published park-wide toilets: the facilities we can evidence are inside Next and inside Asda Living.

Things nobody publishes at all

We could find no confirmation, either way, of cash machines, free Wi-Fi, gift cards, lost property, a prayer or quiet room, park-wide baby changing, a dogs policy or a customer services desk. There is no telephone number for the park itself in public anywhere — the freephone numbers on aggregator sites belong to the aggregators. If one of these decides your trip, ring a tenant: Home Bargains on 01785 332970, Asda Living on 01785 352600.

How it got here

The park’s beginnings are thinly documented. The only build year any source gives is 1987, and it comes from a LoopNet property listing — a commercial-property aggregator, not the operator, not Stafford Borough Council and not the local press. The same listing adds "renovations completed in 2008" and puts the site at 20.06 acres. We have printed 1987 because it is all there is, and flagged it because one aggregator is not a strong source for a founding date.

2008 is the year the park is properly documented, and it was a busy one. In March 2008, according to the deal record of Jones Day, the law firm that acted, Hercules Unit Trust acquired Queens Retail Park for £40 million. The Express & Star, reporting the same transaction locally, said British Land had bought the park from Capital and Counties for £39 million. Those two figures have never been reconciled by anybody, and we are printing both rather than quietly picking one. A million pounds apart, a law firm against a newspaper.

Both accounts agree on the structure. Hercules Unit Trust was British Land’s retail-park vehicle, a joint venture with The Crown Estate — so "Hercules bought it" and "British Land bought it" are the same event described at different levels. British Land raised its stake in the trust to 57.2 per cent in February 2014 and bought further units after that.

What no source states is how that resolved into today’s position at Queens. British Land is named as landlord on its own agent-facing listing and no sale has ever been reported — but nobody publishes the percentage it holds in this asset, so we print none, and you should be sceptical of anywhere that does.

The park you walk round today is largely the 2008 rebuild. The Express & Star described the work: a former B&Q was converted into new retail units — one of 10,000 sq ft and three of 7,500 sq ft each — completing in May 2008. The Next superstore opened that August at 11,500 sq ft, expected to create around eighty jobs. It is 25,000 sq ft today and no source dates the extension. Savills and Wilkinson Williams were the leasing agents then; Morgan Williams and Park Place Retail have the park now.

It is in that report that the only person ever quoted about this park under their own name appears. John Maddison, described simply as asset manager — the article does not say for which company — said the owners "also have long term intentions to improve the site and make further investment in the retail park". Eighteen years on, that remains the only such statement on the record.

Since then the documented history is thin and recent: the Oak Furniture Land fit-out of Unit 2, opened 27 August 2018; an advertisement consent to Stafford Borough Council under reference 23/37213/ADV for that same unit, filed in the council’s own wording against "Queensville Retail Park"; TK Maxx arriving from Friary Green on 22 May 2025; and Hobbycraft leaving in September 2025.