Roaring Meg Retail Park, Stevenage: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A big open-air shopping park off the A1(M) at Stevenage, with a two-floor Marks and Spencer in the old Debenhams, a Next that opened in October 2025, B&Q and Home Bargains, and 1,013 free parking spaces on a four-hour limit. There are four separate schemes in Stevenage that people call Roaring Meg, and only one of them is this one. Here is what the property industry publishes about it, what the council’s planning register adds, why the shops disagree about Sunday opening, and the long list of things nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 12 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Roaring Meg Retail Park sits between the Great North Road and London Road on the southern edge of Stevenage, opposite Stevenage FC’s ground, on the postcode SG1 1XN. It is a conventional open-air retail park of the big-shed sort — no mall, no roof, park outside the door of the shop you want — and it is the largest single retail destination in the town outside the town centre itself.

Before anything else: the name. Four different schemes in Stevenage get called Roaring Meg, or get confused with something that is. This page is about the big one on London Road. It is not Roaring Meg South Retail Park on Monkswood Way, which is a separate 65,256 sq ft investment with Wickes and The Range and was being marketed for sale at over £15m. It is not Monkswood Retail Park on Elder Way, which is 45,994 sq ft of McDonald’s, Topps Tiles, Jollyes and The Food Warehouse next door. And it is not “Roaring Meg Leisure Park”, a thing that does not exist: the Cineworld everybody means is at Stevenage Leisure Park, 12 Kings Way, SG1 2UA, by the town centre, a mile and a half away, with its own website and its own car park. We go through all four below.

There is no shopper-facing website for this park that we could read. A domain called roaringmegretailpark.com exists and is indexed by search engines, but every attempt to reach it from here was refused at the network layer before the site was ever asked for a page — so we cannot tell you what is on it, and we are not going to pretend it is the official site when we never saw a byte of it. The nearest thing to an operator page that we could actually read is the leasing page kept by 9Yards, the asset manager, and that is written for property agents, not for people wanting to know when Boots shuts.

The ownership is a genuine blank on the public register, and that is worth saying out loud. The park is held by Stevenage Retail Ltd, an Isle of Man company registered on the UK’s Register of Overseas Entities. Its beneficial owner, Melford II (GP) LLP of 73 Cornhill in the City, ceased to be a beneficial owner on 8 November 2024 — and the register now carries a statement that no beneficial owners have been identified. Somebody owns this retail park. The public record does not currently say who.

What follows comes from the asset manager’s own scheme page, three separate property agents, two planning statements on Stevenage Borough Council’s register, Companies House, the architect and the building consultancy who did the redevelopment, and the shops’ own store-finder pages. Where two sources give different numbers — and on floorspace there are five — we print all of them and say who published each.

Roaring Meg Retail Park, extending to some 33,000sqm floorspace, and is an established retail destination serving the wider Stevenage area

The essentials

Opening times

All of the above was checked on 12 September 2026, and none of it came from the park. There is no operator page publishing park-wide opening hours that we could find or read. The 9Yards leasing page does not carry any. That is not an oversight on our part and it may not be an oversight on the landlord’s either: an open-air shopping park of this type often has no park-wide trading hours at all, because there is no mall to lock. Each unit has its own front door on its own car park and sets its own times.

The two shops we could read disagree with each other, and we are not resolving it. Next and Superdrug are both server-rendered store-finder pages from the retailers themselves — about as good as third-party hours get. They agree on 9am to 8pm Monday to Friday. They disagree on Saturday, where Next shuts at 7pm and Superdrug at 8pm, and on Sunday, where Next opens at 10am and Superdrug at 10.30am. Both are almost certainly right about themselves.

Two more tenant routes failed. Marks and Spencer’s own store page for “Stevenage Retail Park” and TK Maxx’s page for Unit 4A both render their opening times in JavaScript and returned navigation furniture and nothing else. If you need the M&S times specifically — and with a 174-seat café in there, you might — you will have to open that page in a browser rather than trust anything a page like ours tells you.

One practical note from the Next page that applies to every big shop here: on Sundays and bank holidays, browsing is limited to the first 30 minutes. That is the standard English Sunday trading wind-up, and it means the useful Sunday window at the biggest units is shorter than the printed hours suggest.

Getting there

By road

Junction 7 of the A1(M), then follow the A1155 corridor. Postcode SG1 1XN. We print that junction because three separate property sources publish it and none of them disagree. 9Yards, the asset manager, places the park “near Junction 7 of the A1(M)” and “opposite Stevenage FC”. Completely Retail is more specific: “Roaring Meg is situated between Great North Road and London Road just one mile away from junction 7 of the A1M”. Avison Young, marketing the neighbouring southern scheme, calls Broadhall Way the “main arterial route from A1(M) J7”. The 2014 letting brochure gives the road access as the A1155 and the A1(M).

The one-mile distance is Completely Retail’s, not the landlord’s, so treat it as approximate. The park sits between two named roads and is signposted locally; the football ground opposite is the easiest landmark.

Parking

1,013 free spaces, four-hour maximum stay. That is 9Yards’ own figure and wording, and it is the only space count published for the main park by anyone. The ratio works out at one space per 348 sq ft of floorspace, which is generous by retail-park standards and means you will usually find something.

Nobody names an enforcement company. A four-hour limit has to be enforced somehow, and at a park of this size that almost always means cameras — but no source we could reach names an operator, a contractor or an appeals route. Neither is any height restriction published, so if you are driving a van or something with a roof box you will have to look at the barriers when you arrive rather than plan around a number. Parkopedia does carry an entry for the car park; it returned an error to us, so we have nothing from it.

Note that the 257 spaces at Roaring Meg South are a different car park serving different shops. Do not add the two together.

By rail

Stevenage station is the town’s main railhead, on the East Coast Main Line with fast services to London King’s Cross and to the north, plus the Great Northern route. It is in the town centre, roughly a mile north of the park. Nobody — not the landlord, not the council, not the train operators — publishes a walking time or a step-free route from the station to Roaring Meg, so we are not inventing one. If you are arriving by train and heading here, plan on a bus or a taxi rather than assuming a short walk.

By bus

No bus route numbers are published for this park by any source we could read. Stevenage has an extensive local bus network and the London Road corridor is a main route, but neither the asset manager nor the council lists which services stop at or near the park. This is a real gap and it is in the caveats below.

By bike and on foot

Stevenage is unusual among English towns for having a comprehensive segregated cycleway network, built in with the new town from the 1950s onwards and still largely intact. The park’s own cycle provision is a different question: the 2021 application for the South Car Park proposed the “creation of new cycle parking facilities” — the wording implies there was not much before — and we could not confirm whether that work was carried out. No cycle parking count is published.

Coaches, taxis and motorhomes

Nothing is published about any of them. No coach bay, no taxi rank and no overnight or motorhome provision is confirmed by any source.

The shops

The anchors

The park’s centre of gravity is the Marks and Spencer, which opened on Thursday 28 April 2022 in the unit Debenhams left. It is 10,000 sq m over two floors — clothing, food, kidswear, beauty, an optician and a 174-seat café — and created up to 150 jobs. The principal contractor was Audas Project Management Ltd. 9Yards calls it a “flagship” store, and for a retail park rather than a high street it genuinely is one.

The other big names on the asset manager’s own list are B&Q, Home Bargains, Currys, Next, DFS, TK Maxx and Homesense (sharing a building, as they usually do) and Sports Direct, with “19 additional retailers” unnamed behind them.

Next, October 2025

The most recent significant change is the Next, which opened in October 2025 in Units 11A and 11B — a full-line store with, in the architect’s words, “a substantial mezzanine”. Mountford Pigott LLP designed it for 9Yards. There is a Costa inside it, listed by Costa at Units 11A and 11B with baby changing, disabled access, disabled toilets and Wi-Fi. Costa also lists a second branch about 110 metres away, so there are two Costas within a short walk of each other on the same site.

The Next application was significant enough locally to get its own public consultation microsite, roaringmegnext.co.uk. That domain still exists; like the park’s own, it was unreachable from our network.

Who else is here

There is no store directory we could read, so this is a composite from four sources of different ages and you should expect it to be imperfect. Between them, Completely Retail, the council’s 2023 planning statement and the architect’s 2025 note list: Boots, Wren Kitchens, Furniture Village, Oak Furnitureland, ScS, Smyths Toys, Mountain Warehouse, Superdrug (Unit 3A) and truGym. For food: Nando’s, a Harvester, Burger King, Pizza Hut and the Costas.

A small oddity worth recording: Nando’s own website gives the restaurant’s location as “9 Yards Retail Park” — the asset manager’s name has leaked out of the property world and onto a consumer-facing page. If you search for a Nando’s at 9 Yards Retail Park, this is the park you will arrive at.

What has gone

Debenhams is the clear one: M&S is in its building, so it had gone before April 2022. Toys R Us traded here and went with the chain. Beyond that we have to be careful. A letting brochure from November 2014 lists Carpetright, Harveys, Partyman, Sharps, Tapi, Hobbycraft and Argos at the park; none of them appears on any current list we have. But we could not source a dated closure for a single one of them, so what we can honestly say is that they were on the 2014 plan and are not on the 2026 one. That is not the same as saying when they left, and we are not going to dress it up as if it were.

A planning quirk

The 2014 brochure describes the park’s planning consent as “Open A1 Non Food Retail (Except Fashion & Footwear)” — that is, everything except clothes and shoes. The park now has a flagship Marks and Spencer, a full-line Next, a TK Maxx, a Sports Direct and a Mountain Warehouse. The restriction was plainly varied at some point, which is a normal and well-trodden planning story at out-of-town parks across the country. No source we read dates the variation, which is a shame, because it is the single decision that turned this from a bulky-goods park into a clothing destination.

Useful to know

Accessibility

There is no park-wide accessibility information, and that is the most disappointing gap on this page. We found no AccessAble guide, no Euan’s Guide entry and no operator accessibility page for Roaring Meg. What exists is per-shop and thin: Superdrug’s own page says its store is wheelchair accessible; the Costa inside Next lists disabled access, disabled toilets and baby changing.

The 2021 planning application for the South Car Park proposed “provision of additional parent and child and disabled parking”. We could not establish whether it was built. No Changing Places toilet is recorded anywhere for this park — which is not the same as saying there isn’t one, only that nobody publishes it. If a Changing Places facility matters to your trip, the national Changing Places register is the place to check before you set off, not this page and not the park.

The park’s basic shape works in its favour: it is flat, open-air, single-level at ground floor, with parking directly outside the shop fronts and no mall to cross. The M&S and the Next both have upper floors, reached internally.

Toilets, Wi-Fi, dogs and gift cards

None of these is published for the park as a whole. There is no park gift card, no park Wi-Fi, no stated dog policy and no lost property contact — because there is no readable operator site to publish them on. Toilets in practice mean the ones inside M&S, Next and the restaurants. The Costa in Next lists Wi-Fi and disabled toilets.

Eating

A GoodFoodTalks listing exists for “Stevenage Roaring Meg”, which means at least one restaurant here publishes accessible menus for blind and partially sighted customers. The sit-down options are the Harvester and Nando’s; the quick options are Burger King, Pizza Hut and the two Costas; and the M&S café with its 174 seats is the largest room to sit down in on the park.

Clean air and congestion

Stevenage has no clean air zone, no low emission zone and no congestion charge. Nothing about driving here costs money except your fuel, and the parking is free.

Quiet hours

None published. Some parks and centres now run an autism-friendly quiet hour with the music off; nobody publishes one for Roaring Meg, and individual shops may run their own without saying so centrally.

How it got here

1987: the consent

The oldest hard date anybody publishes for this park is a planning permission. Stevenage Borough Council’s own planning material for Unit 7B records that the retail park received its original planning permission in April 1987, reference 2/0048/87, and that the 1987 development description included “water meadow” improvements — a small detail that tells you what was on the land before the sheds went up.

We have no opening date. A consent is not an opening; parks of this size routinely take two or three years to build and let. Nobody — not the landlord, not the council, not the trade press, not the local press we are able to read — publishes when Roaring Meg Retail Park actually started trading, or whether it opened under this name. We would rather leave that blank than guess a year.

The river under the car park

The single most interesting fact about this site comes from a building consultancy’s project page rather than from anyone in retail. TFT Consultants, working as project manager, employer’s agent, principal designer and party wall surveyor on the park’s redevelopment under project lead Dan Cooper, records that the site is “heavily congested with underground services” and contains a culverted river and a trunk sewer, both of which needed advanced surveys to locate before anything could be demolished or built. Their summary of the job is that “the retail park remained trading throughout the works”.

TFT describes the scheme as a 299,000 sq ft retail park and the work in two stages: stage one demolished 30,000 sq ft and replaced it with 45,000 sq ft, completed in under six months; stage two replaced an occupied unit. The tenants they name — Debenhams, Toys R Us, Boots and Argos — date the work to before the Toys R Us collapse of 2018.

Debenhams out, M&S in

The defining event of the park’s recent history is the conversion of the Debenhams into a Marks and Spencer, which opened on 28 April 2022. That is an unusually happy outcome for a Debenhams box: most of them sat empty for years or were carved into three. Here, a 10,000 sq m two-floor department store was replaced by another two-floor department store of comparable scale, with up to 150 jobs. Audas Project Management ran it as principal contractor, and the project director, Gareth Speed, called it “one of the largest projects we have completed for M&S”.

The Next of October 2025 completed the shift. In roughly three years the park went from a bulky-goods park with a struggling department store to a clothing-led shopping park with two of the biggest names in British high-street retail on it.

The ownership chain, as far as it goes

The park is held by Stevenage Retail Ltd — Isle of Man company 018128V, registered on the UK Register of Overseas Entities as OE011395 on 6 January 2023, registered office at First Names House, Victoria Road, Douglas. The same name, “Stevenage Retail Limited (SRL)”, appears as the applicant on the park’s planning applications for Units 11A and 11B in 2021 and Unit 7B in 2023, which is a useful independent confirmation that this is the entity that actually holds the asset.

Behind it, Melford II (GP) LLP of 73 Cornhill, London EC3V 3QQ, was registered as holding more than 25% of the voting rights — and ceased to be a beneficial owner on 8 November 2024. Several earlier statements from 2023 to 2025 have been withdrawn. As of the entity’s last annual statement, dated 5 January 2026, the register carries an active statement that no beneficial owners have been identified.

Day to day, the party behaving like an owner is 9Yards, which manages the asset — Mountford Pigott names 9 Yards as its “asset management client” — and which files the park in a portfolio it brands “Melford Park”. Before anyone reads too much into that: 9Yards uses the Melford Park label on every scheme page it publishes, from Croydon to Dunfermline. It is a fund name, not a rebranding of Roaring Meg, and no shopper has ever been asked to call this park anything else.

No sale of Roaring Meg has ever been reported in any trade source we could read. Green Street News carries a deal record for the park; it refused our request, so the buyer, the seller, the price and the date are all unknown to us. We would rather tell you that than print a number we have not seen.

The name: a cannon, a stream, or a field?

“Roaring Meg” is an old English nickname, most often attached to cannon and to noisy water — waterfalls and mill-races. Neither of those is the answer here, or at least neither can be shown to be.

The best evidence we found points to a field name. The Survey of English Place-Names, the English Place-Name Society’s scholarly county-by-county survey hosted by the University of Nottingham, indexes a name “Roaring Megg Plantation” in the parish of Shephall, Hertfordshire — Shephall being the old parish immediately east of the retail park. In other words, Roaring Meg was a local place name before it was a shopping destination, and the park was named after the ground rather than the other way round. We could not read the Survey’s actual entry — the page redirects to the university’s homepage — so we have the name, the spelling and the parish but not the documentary forms, the dates or the Society’s own explanation of what the name meant.

The stream theory does not stand up on the evidence we have. There is certainly a culverted watercourse under the park — TFT says so. But TFT does not name it, Stevenage’s named watercourse is the Stevenage Brook (that is what the Environment Agency’s flood warning area for the town is called), and Stevenage Borough Council’s Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment, which we searched in full, does not contain the words “Roaring Meg” anywhere. If an official Stevenage flood document does not use the name for a stream, we are not going to.

And the cannon? No source connects any cannon to Stevenage. It is a nice story and there is nothing behind it.

The four schemes

This is the part that trips everybody up, so here they are with their postcodes.

1. Roaring Meg Retail Park, London Road / Great North Road, SG1 1XN. This page. About 350,000 sq ft, 23 units, M&S, Next, B&Q, Home Bargains, Currys, TK Maxx, DFS, Sports Direct.

2. Roaring Meg South Retail Park, Monkswood Way, quoted under the same SG1 1XN postcode. A completely separate investment: 65,256 sq ft excluding the car wash, four retail warehouse units, fully let to four tenants including Wickes, The Range and KFC, freehold, six acres, 257 car park spaces. Avison Young has been marketing it at offers in excess of £15,270,000 exclusive of VAT, a 7.00% net initial yield and £233 per sq ft, on a passing rent of £1,140,763.49. That is an asking price on a live marketing page, not a completed sale. Its floorspace and its parking are not part of the figures above.

3. Monkswood Retail Park, Elder Way, SG1 1TL. 45,994 sq ft, with McDonald’s, Topps Tiles, Jollyes, The Food Warehouse and Home Bargains; let by Morgan Williams. Completely Retail’s own description places it “immediately adjacent to The Roaring Meg Retail Park”.

4. Stevenage Leisure Park, 12 Kings Way, SG1 2UA, with its own operator site at stevenageleisurepark.co.uk. This is where Cineworld is — Unit 4 — along with the town’s other big leisure operators. It is by the town centre, about a mile and a half from Roaring Meg, and it is not called Roaring Meg Leisure Park by anyone who runs it.

Where does “Roaring Meg Leisure Park” come from, then? Our best guess is Parkopedia, which lists a single car park under the name “Roaring Meg Retail & Leisure Park”, a title that has clearly propagated. Stevenage Borough Council itself keeps them apart: its own regeneration site says the town “has a number of distinct shopping areas including the Roaring Meg, Town Centre, Leisure Park and the Old Town” — four areas, the Roaring Meg and the Leisure Park among them, separately.

One more for completeness: there is a pub-restaurant trading as The Roaring Meg Harvester. That is a Harvester, and it takes its name from the same local place name.

If you are comparing

Stevenage sits in a crowded corner of the map for out-of-town shopping. The Galleria at Hatfield is the nearest large outlet centre, about twenty minutes south down the A1(M); Brent Cross is the nearest big enclosed mall on the same road into London; and Rushden Lakes is the region’s showpiece modern shopping park if you want to see what a 2010s answer to the same brief looks like.