Riverside Retail Park, Nottingham: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A big surface retail park on Queens Drive in the south-west of Nottingham, built on the site of a power station and anchored by a very large B&Q. It has no website. Not a blocked one, not a broken one — no consumer website exists for this park at all, so every opening time on this page comes from an individual shop rather than from the park. Here is what can actually be sourced, who published each figure, and the long list of things nobody publishes.

Last checked 10 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Riverside Retail Park sits on Queens Drive in the south-west of Nottingham, on the flat ground between the ring road and the River Trent. It is a conventional open-air park of the big-box generation: one very large B&Q with a TradePoint counter inside it, a row of medium boxes, and 1,094 parking spaces across the front of them.

Start with the thing that shapes everything else here: there is no website. Most retail parks have a thin operator site with a store list and an opening-hours page. This one does not. We searched three separate ways and found only property agents' letting pages, retailers' own store finders and directory scrapers — no operator phone number, no store directory, no getting-here page, no accessibility page. Everything below is either a shop speaking for itself or a property professional speaking to other property professionals.

The owner is BlackRock. Four separate parties name the BlackRock UK Property Fund as owner: the managing agent, two letting agents and the trade press covering its planning application. None publish a price, a date, a percentage or a holding company — there is no reported transaction for this park anywhere. We name the owner because four professional parties do; we put no year or figure next to it, because nobody has.

Two more things before you search. There are at least five Riverside Retail Parks in England, so check the postcode is NG2 1RU. And the road through the park is called Electric Avenue because this is the site of the North Wilford power station, which made electricity for Nottingham from 1925 until 1981.

Aerial photograph of the view from the north east of North Wilford Power Station, the River Trent and St Wilfred's Church, Nottingham; May 1951. This is now the site of the Riverside Retail Park.

The essentials

Opening times

Every line in that table was checked on 10 September 2026, and every line is one shop speaking for itself. With no operator website there are no park hours to check against, and we have not invented a composite. Five of the seven come from the retailer's own site; Poundland's and the Food Warehouse's come from aggregators, labelled as such, because neither retailer's own page could be read.

The pattern that matters is Sunday. B&Q, TradePoint, Home Bargains, JD Sports, Poundland and the Food Warehouse all shut at 4pm. Next is the exception in both directions — open at 10.30am rather than 10am, trading until 4.30pm — and its own page adds that Sunday and bank holiday mornings are "browsing only for the first 30 mins". At the other end of the day, B&Q and TradePoint open at 7am Monday to Saturday, two hours before Next and JD. If you want an empty car park, that is the window.

Getting there

By road — and why there is no junction number on this page

Use NG2 1RU. There is no motorway junction on this page, and the reason is simple: a junction number goes on our pages only if the operator publishes it, and here there is no operator to publish anything. The park sits close enough to the A52 and the Clifton Bridge approach that guessing at an M1 junction would be easy and would probably be wrong.

The agents' own wording puts the park "south west of the city centre on Queens Drive, off the Ring Road" (Completely Retail), "2 miles southwest of Nottingham City Centre" (ShopsNearMe) and "2.5 miles south" — that last on Completely Retail's own second listing for the same park.

Parking

1,094 spaces and free. That figure is given identically by the managing agent, a letting agent and Parkopedia, which is unusually good agreement for a park with no website.

The time limit is shorter than most people assume and it changes at the weekend. Parkopedia records a maximum stay of two hours thirty minutes, 6am to 8.30pm Monday to Friday, four hours at the same times on Saturday and Sunday, and twenty minutes overnight, enforced by Evology Parking. Parkopedia is crowd-sourced and no operator or agent confirms any of it — but two and a half hours is an oddly specific figure, the sort read off a sign rather than guessed. Check the signage, and do not plan a leisurely weekday afternoon assuming three or four hours. Parkopedia also records no height restriction and the presence of disabled bays.

By bus

This is the realistic public-transport option. Queen's Drive Park and Ride, NG2 1AP, is right beside the park, and Nottingham City Council states it is "served by NCT 49 - Boots Site to City" plus the Medilink service, which also runs to the QMC and the City Hospital. The council prices its bus park and ride at £6 per car.

The journey planner Moovit — a third party, not an operator — adds 49A, 49B, 901, MED2, 48, 48X, 53, 54, 1, 3, N4 and Skylink Express for the area, and gives the nearest stops as Queens Drive Park & Ride (31 metres) and Clifton Bridge North (375 metres) — measured from the park and ride, not from the shop doors.

By tram — it does not come here

This is the mistake to avoid. "Nottingham park and ride" makes most people think of the tram, and Queen's Drive is a bus park and ride, not a tram one. By Moovit's figures the nearest tram stop is Wilford Village, 1,600 metres away — a twenty-one minute walk. Coming in on the tram means finishing the journey on foot or by bus.

By train

Nobody publishes a walking distance or time from any railway station to this park — not a rail company, not a journey planner, not an agent, and there is no operator to publish one. The agents' two-to-two-and-a-half-mile figures are distances from the city centre, not walking routes from a station, and we are not turning one into the other.

The shops

With no store directory, the list below is built from the retailers' own store finders — each checked on 10 September 2026 — plus the managing agent's unit schedule. It is the most reliable list that can be assembled, and it is still shorter than the park.

Confirmed trading

• B&Q — Unit 1, 101,580 sq ft, with paint mixing, timber and key cutting, kitchen and bathroom showrooms and Rug Doctor hire
• TradePoint — the trade counter inside the B&Q, with its own phone line and click-and-collect
• Next — Unit C on Next's own address, Unit 4 on the agent's schedule, 10,000 sq ft, with home, lingerie, schoolwear and Lipsy
• JD Sports — Unit 1A, 8,568 sq ft
• Poundland — Unit E on its own address, Unit 6 on the agent's schedule, 23,922 sq ft, a "flagship store for new format" in the agent's words
• Home Bargains — store A755; and The Food Warehouse, Iceland's large-format store
• Boots — Unit 2, 10,204 sq ft, confirmed by the agent's schedule; we could not read Boots' own page for it

Argos (as "Argos Extra") and Screwfix are named on letting and directory pages but could not be confirmed against either retailer's own store finder. Given how many standalone Argos Extra stores have closed into Sainsbury's since 2020, do not assume Argos is trading here without checking.

The unit numbering is a mess, and it is worth knowing why

The managing agent publishes a schedule of seven units numbered 1 to 7, totalling about 174,000 sq ft. The shops themselves use letters and other numbers: Next says Unit C, Poundland says Unit E, JD says 1A, and the planning application covers "units A to D". At least two numbering systems run on one park, and the seven-unit schedule cannot be the whole of it.

A second oddity: Completely Retail lists the former Toys R Us box, 20,214 sq ft on Electric Avenue, as a separate scheme entry with the same agent — and 20,214 sq ft is exactly the combined size of the agent's vacant units 3 and 5. The old box appears to have been split in two and marketed both ways at once, which is why the same empty space turns up twice if you go looking.

What has arrived — one dated, three not

JD Sports opened over the weekend of 27–28 November 2021, in Unit 1A, with fifteen jobs advertised — its fourth Nottingham store, after Clumber Street, the Victoria Centre and Victoria Retail Park. That comes from West Bridgford Wire on 25 November 2021 and it is the only dated arrival at this park in the public record. Poundland, The Food Warehouse and Home Bargains are all described by the managing agent as recent additions, with no opening date published for any of the three. Proposed but unconfirmed: two drive-thru pods for Popeyes and Starbucks and a food-retail conversion of units A to D — see the history section below.

What has gone — one dated, everything else undated

Toys R Us closed in early 2018, and that is the only departure date anybody gives — no month attached. For everything else we have to work backwards from stale directories, which is a rough method and we are labelling it as one. Two directory sites still publish tenant lists containing Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, Oasis, Warehouse, Wallis, Evans, Outfit and DW Sports — every one of which stopped trading from physical shops in the Arcadia and DW Sports collapses of 2020 and 2021. Several were concessions inside a single Outfit unit rather than eleven separate shops; one of the directories says so itself. All this proves is that those names were here when the directories were last updated and are not here now. There are no dates and we are not implying any.

And this is how much weight to put on any tenant list you find for this park: in September 2026 the marketing agent's own live scheme page still describes the mix as "B&Q Warehouse, Argos Extra, Boots, Next, Toys R Us and Outfit" — naming a retailer that closed in 2018 and a format that closed in 2021. If the people paid to market the place have not updated the list, the aggregators certainly have not.

Useful to know

Accessibility — one properly surveyed source, and one you should ignore

There is no park-wide access guide, because there is no operator to commission one. What exists is AccessAble's guide to the B&Q, surveyed September 2023, and it is genuinely detailed:

Seven Blue Badge bays, each 230cm by 482cm, with a hatched zone of at least 120cm on both sides but not to the rear; tarmac, open-air, roughly 6 metres from the TradePoint entrance, with step-free access throughout. Main entrance automatic double doors 188cm wide, TradePoint entrance sliding doors 250cm. An accessible toilet with an 86cm door, grab rails and a lever mixer tap — but AccessAble records that it does not meet its criteria, and that the emergency alarm cord was tied up at the time of the survey; a flip-down baby change table at 96cm is inside it. No Changing Places toilet, and no hearing assistance system at the planning areas or any counter.

One honest caveat: that guide is titled "B&Q Nottingham" and does not state its address in the text we could read. We attribute it to this store because it describes a TradePoint entrance and this store has one — an inference. AccessAble also has a guide for the Next store here, indexed and real, but it returned a 403 error to us.

Do not rely on AccessAdvisr for this park. Its entry claims lifts, help points and a Changing Places facility, with no user reviews behind any of it — and the one properly surveyed source found no Changing Places toilet.

Time your visit round the car park, and charge elsewhere

If the crowd-sourced parking data is right — and it is the only data there is — you have two and a half hours on a weekday and four at the weekend. Fine for a run to B&Q and Home Bargains; tight if you meant to do the whole park and eat. And there is no charging on the retail park itself: the InstaVolt site at a Starbucks on Queen's Drive (NG2 1AL, three chargers up to 160kW, 24 hours) and the bp pulse site at Queen's Drive Park and Ride (NG2 1AP, eighteen connectors mostly at 7kW) are both nearby, and neither is at NG2 1RU.

Things nobody publishes

Nothing is published by anyone about park toilets, a park-wide Changing Places facility, Wi-Fi, cash machines, lost property, gift cards, a dogs policy, quiet hours, coach parking, a taxi rank or cycle parking. That does not mean none of these exist — it means there is no operator writing anything down.

Nearby alternatives

Giltbrook Shopping Park is the other big out-of-town box park on the Nottingham side of the county, Fosse Park at Leicester is the much larger regional equivalent, and East Midlands Designer Outlet is the outlet option rather than the big-box one.

How it got here

The power station under the car park

The road through the middle of this retail park is called Electric Avenue, and that is not a whimsical developer's name. The site was North Wilford power station. The University of Nottingham's Manuscripts and Special Collections holds the records: construction was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War but the station opened in 1925, and the archive holds the pamphlet produced to mark its opening by Alderman Edmund Huntsman, Chairman of the Electricity Committee. It closed in 1981. The same archive holds an aerial photograph from May 1951 looking from the north-east across the power station, the Trent and St Wilfrid's Church, whose catalogue caption — quoted at the top of this page — states flatly that this is now the site of Riverside Retail Park. It is the best-sourced sentence anyone has written about this piece of ground.

When the retail park opened: nobody knows

No opening year for this retail park is published by anybody — not the owner, not the three agents marketing it, not the trade press, not the council, not the local papers. The single statement in existence is East Midlands Business Link's, on 16 September 2025, describing a park that "has operated for approximately 30 years". That points at the mid 1990s. The power station closed in 1981, and what happened to the site in the fourteen-odd years between is not recorded anywhere we could reach. We are not converting "approximately 30 years" into a year, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.

Ownership: BlackRock, and nothing else on the record

The BlackRock UK Property Fund owns this asset. That is stated by its managing agent Curson Sowerby Partners, by Rosebury Real Estate, by Harvey Spack Field, and by East Midlands Business Link, which names the planning applicant as "The Trustees of the Blackrock UK Property Fund". Four parties, three of them professionals acting on the asset.

What does not exist is a transaction. No price, no date, no percentage, no holding company, no reported sale in or out. The only duration statement anywhere is Harvey Spack Field's line that it has "worked with BlackRock's UK Property Fund for over three decades on this Nottingham asset" — a statement about how long the agent has been involved, not about how long BlackRock has owned it. We print it as the agent's wording and leave the inference to you.

What BlackRock actually owns is not published either

There is a genuine boundary question here and we would rather flag it than smooth it over. The managing agent's schedule covers seven units totalling about 174,000 sq ft, on a park variously described as 210,000, 220,753 or 260,000 sq ft; the planning application concerns "units A to D", none of which appear on that schedule; Completely Retail carries two separate scheme entries for the same postcode; and Harvey Spack Field's summary of 2022 mentions "expansion in ownership" — BlackRock bought more of the park that year — without saying what, from whom, or for how much. One directory places the whole thing "within the Queens Drive Industrial Estate", and several businesses on scraped tenant lists for it look like Queens Drive addresses rather than units in the park, so we have not listed them. Where the retail park stops and the industrial estate begins is not published anywhere.

The planning file

Two references are on the public record: 22/02200/PFUL3, a planning permission that certainly exists — a condition cannot be discharged against a permission that was never granted — and 24/00923/PDS4, validated on 3 June 2024, an application by Firstplan's Joshua Hindle to discharge condition 4 of it. We could not read the parent permission: Nottingham City Council's planning portal failed for us at the security layer, its certificate chain unverifiable, so what it permitted and when it was granted are unknown to us. What we can say is that somebody was still working through its conditions in June 2024 — two years after the scheme was first reported, a year before it was reported again.