Rushmere Shopping Centre, Craigavon: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A covered mall and an open retail park sharing one car park estate, one website and one owner, halfway between Lurgan and Portadown. Before you search for it: rushmereshoppingcentre.com does not exist. The operator you want is rushmereshopping.com. Parking is free and there are more than 1,800 spaces. Here is what the operator publishes, what it does not, and where the numbers disagree.

Last checked 8 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Rushmere sits on Central Way in the middle of Craigavon, the planned new town laid out between Lurgan and Portadown in the 1960s. It opened in 1976 and has grown by extension ever since: a covered mall of just over 350,000 sq ft, and an open retail park of more than 130,000 sq ft alongside it, sharing car parks, a store directory and a mobility-scooter service. The operator calls the combination "Northern Ireland's Largest Shopping Destination" — its own claim rather than anyone else's measurement, and we have treated it as such.

Start with the web address. The domain that circulates for this centre — rushmereshoppingcentre.com — does not resolve at all. It is not parked, not blocked, not slow: the name does not exist. The operator's real site is rushmereshopping.com, a properly server-rendered site whose centre information, parking, directions, lettings, Shopmobility and store pages all load and can be read. If you are ringing ahead, the number is 028 3834 3350.

The ownership has changed and a lot of the internet has not caught up. Rushmere is owned by Killahoey Ltd, a Northern Irish joint venture between Sheephaven and May Street Capital, which bought it out of administration in February 2023. The previous owner, Central Craigavon Limited — part of the Moyallen group — collapsed in April 2022 owing about £91m. Anything naming Central Craigavon or Moyallen as the owner is four years out of date.

And one thing this centre does not publish is the obvious one: its opening hours. The table below is built out of the operator's own individual store pages and three tenants' national store finders, which agree with each other, plus the one source that disagrees.

Rushmere has never been as popular and our investment in new stores and in enhancing the centre's appeal is proving a big hit

The essentials

Opening times

Rushmere does not publish its opening hours. That is the finding, and it is unusual enough to state plainly. Its centre information page says only "Open everyday for your convenience"; the home page says "Open 7 days a week"; and the URL that looks like an opening-hours page returns the site's generic shell with no times on it. Checked 8 September 2026.

What does work is the operator's individual store pages. They carry hours, and they are the operator speaking. Its Mango and TK Maxx pages both give 9am to 9pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Saturday and 1pm to 6pm Sunday; its Primark page gives the same except for a 12.30pm Sunday start. We then went to the standard independent route — the tenants' own national store finders — and H&M and Mango both publish exactly the same pattern. Five sources, three of them independent of the centre, agreeing on 9am to 9pm weekdays. That is the headline.

One source disagrees and we have printed it rather than hiding it. The directory site ukmalls.co.uk gives Monday as 10am to 6pm and only Tuesday to Friday as 9am to 9pm. Nothing else suggests a short Monday, and that page still names Sainsbury's and Debenhams as anchors, both long gone — but with no operator table to overrule it, we are not going to pretend the conflict does not exist. Ring 028 3834 3350 before a Monday-morning trip.

The Sunday row is a Northern Ireland row. Large shops in Northern Ireland trade for five consecutive hours between 1pm and 6pm on a Sunday, which is why every store here opens at one o'clock. Next's own listing spells out the other half of that regime: browsing is limited to 30 minutes on Sundays and bank holidays before you make a purchase.

Getting there

By road

Use BT64 1AA. Every route the operator publishes converges on Central Way, the A3, with the centre "located on the left after the roundabout".

On the junction, the operator does publish one — but only in one direction. Its directions page gives town-by-town routes, and four name the same exit: from Dungannon, Cookstown, Coalisland or Omagh you join the M1 and, in the operator's words, "at Junction 11, take the M12 exit to Craigavon/Portadown". The M12 is a short spur off the M1 into Craigavon. So M1 Junction 11, then the M12 is the operator's own instruction and we are happy to print it. What it does not do is number the exit for anyone coming from Belfast or Lisburn, the biggest approaches — the Lisburn route says only "the A3 and M1/M12". We are not supplying a number the operator has chosen not to publish; from that side, follow the M1 and the signs for the M12 and Craigavon.

Parking

Free, with more than 1,800 spaces — a figure the operator repeats on four of its own pages, which is as solid as these things get. There are two kinds: surface car parks serving mall and retail park, and a covered underground car park with direct access into the shopping centre, with lifts by Waterstones up to the first floor. Blue badge spaces are near the entrances and there are parent-and-baby bays, though no counts are published for either.

No time limit is published, no enforcement company is named, and no height restriction is published for the underground car park. That last one is a genuine gap: an underground deck is precisely where a van or a roof box gets caught out, and nobody states the clearance. Electric vehicle charging is four Weev units — two 24kW DC and two 22kW AC — accessed through the MyWeev app, with no tariff or bay location published.

By bus

Translink is the answer, and the operator goes no further than saying so: "Translink offer a number of buses to and from Rushmere Shopping Centre", plus Translink's number, 028 9066 6630, and a link to translink.co.uk. It names no route numbers at all. We confirmed one independently: Ulsterbus service 61, between Portadown rail station and Armagh bus centre, terminates at a stop named "Rushmere Shopping Centre" — useful, because it links the centre directly to a railway station. Plan the rest on Translink's journey planner.

By train

The operator does not mention the railway anywhere — no station, no distance, no walking time, on any page we read. The nearest NI Railways stations on the Belfast to Portadown line are Lurgan and Portadown, and the operator's description of its location, "equidistant between Portadown and Lurgan, some 30 miles to the west of Belfast", is the closest it comes to acknowledging either. No walking distance from either station is published by anyone and we are not going to estimate one. The practical answer is the 61 from Portadown station, or a taxi.

The shops

We counted 71 names on the operator's live directory on 8 September 2026, against "70+" from the operator, 60 commercial units in the February 2023 sale release and, in the Irish News in June 2022, about 75 units in the centre plus 10 in the retail park. Those count different things — a vacant unit is not a brand — so all of them are in the table above rather than one.

One directory covers two schemes. Primark, H&M, Mango, River Island, New Look, TK Maxx, Dunnes Stores, Boots, JD Sports and Waterstones are in the covered mall; Next, Currys, Matalan, Sports Direct, Pets at Home, B&M, Home Bargains and Argos are in the retail park. They keep different hours and are measured separately, but they are one ownership and one website. Primark anchors the mall — 30,800 sq ft, £6m, 140 jobs — and Matalan anchors the park.

What has arrived, with dates

• Primark — 16 December 2022. Unit A, 30,800 sq ft, £6m, 140 jobs, announced by the borough council. It opened while the centre was still in administration, which is not a common sequence of events. Poundland followed in 2022 too, undated, and is not on the current directory — though no closure has been reported either.
• Waterstones and Miniso — late 2023. No exact dates published.
• Thirteen stores across 2024: Mango, Rituals, Schuh, Søstrene Grene, Mountain Warehouse, Caffè Nero and Warren James, six of them into the former Sainsbury's unit, plus expansions by JD Sports and Superdrug, and PureGym in December 2024.
• Dunelm — reported 2 April 2026 as taking the amalgamated former B&M and Poundstretcher units in the retail park, opening within "coming weeks". It would be the chain's first store in County Armagh. It is not on the operator's directory yet, so treat it as imminent rather than trading.
• A bar and an 82-seat restaurant — approved 3 March 2026 for Unit 36, the former Synge & Byrne beside EE at the west entrance. Around 3,300 sq ft including an extension and 26 outdoor seats, with its own external door so it can trade outside centre hours. Local reporting called it the first licensed bar at Rushmere in over 30 years.

Two of those reports collide. The same publication that reported the bar approval in March 2026 reported a month later that Wingstop was opening in the former Synge & Byrne unit. Wingstop is on the directory today. Both cannot be the same unit, and nothing reconciles them. Mango, likewise, has two opening dates: the December 2024 round-up counts it among that year's thirteen arrivals, while a February 2025 report gave 14 February 2025. Both are printed because nobody has corrected either.

What has gone, with dates where they exist

• Debenhams — May 2021. The first floor of the unit has been empty ever since.
• Sainsbury's — 26 February 2022, with 97 jobs lost. It surrendered a 50,000 sq ft unit on a lease that had until March 2023 to run, and the administrators later cited that lost income as one reason the centre sold below its asking price.
• Homebase, in the retail park — early January 2025, after the chain's November 2024 administration. Craigavon was not among the stores rescued. Job losses were not quantified. B&M did not leave — it moved, out of Unit 7 and into the former Homebase in September 2025, which is what freed the units Dunelm is taking. Poundstretcher is part of the same amalgamation, with no closure date published.
• Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins and HMV all appear on older tenant listings and are absent today. Those were national collapses, and no Rushmere closure date exists for any of them, so we have not invented one.

What is proposed but not built

Lidl wants the former Sainsbury's petrol station site on Central Way, beside the centre — a £9m investment relocating its Balteagh Road store and supporting the equivalent of 40 full-time jobs. Plans went to the borough council with approval expected "before the summer" of 2025. No approval, opening date or store size has been confirmed since, and it is not open.

The Debenhams first floor is the subject of an application dated 16 August 2026 by Formation Works Ltd: a £2.7m, nearly 22,000 sq ft office suite with 180 workstations, said to support up to 200 jobs. That is an application, not a permission. A 24-hour gym was approved for the same floor previously and never built.

Useful to know

Mobility scooters, free

This is the best thing the operator publishes. Rushmere runs a Shopmobility partnership and the mobility scooters are free of charge. You collect and return an application form at the Guest Services desk, first-time users do a short training session, and scooters must be back no later than 30 minutes before the centre closes. They can be used in the mall and on the retail park pathways, but not on public roads. A limited number of manual wheelchairs is available from the same desk.

Getting around, and the toilets

The operator states the centre is wheelchair accessible throughout, and the lifts by Waterstones connect the underground car park to the first level — worth knowing before you pick a car park. Guest Services is in front of the Post Office, and the public toilets are next to that Post Office in the East Mall and underground on the approach to the main stairs and lifts, with parent-and-child facilities inside them.

What we could not confirm

A summary of one operator URL mentioned a Changing Places toilet, free Wi-Fi, lost property and a dogs-welcome policy. None appear on the substantive centre-information page and none could be confirmed against a second operator page, so we have not printed them as facts — phone 028 3834 3350 if one of them decides your trip. There is also no published quiet hour, prayer room, cash machine listing, or AccessAble or Euan's Guide survey.

Do not confuse it with Marlborough

Marlborough Retail Park in Craigavon is a different scheme with a different owner. Around 80,000 sq ft, owned by Turkington Properties, with a 30,000 sq ft extension approved on 26 June 2023. In that case the planners described Rushmere as Craigavon's primary retail core and explained that the proposal went to Marlborough because Rushmere's remaining units were the wrong size. Floorspace and tenant news for the two get mixed up online, and they should not.

How it got here

Rushmere opened in 1976, built as the shopping heart of the Craigavon new town — the planned city laid out in the 1960s to link Lurgan and Portadown, whose spine roads still explain why the centre sits where it does, on Central Way with the A3 past it and not much immediately around it. It has grown by extension ever since: a second phase in 1998, a third about six years later which included the unit that became Debenhams, and a 2018 extension adding restaurant units.

One date does not fit. The Belfast News Letter reported in December 2024 that Rushmere would celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2027. From a 1976 opening that falls in 2026. Either the opening year is a year later than everybody prints or the anniversary is wrong, and nobody has addressed it.

The collapse

Central Craigavon Limited, the company that owned Rushmere, went into administration on 7 April 2022 owing about £91m. It was part of the Moyallen group, and three other Moyallen companies followed in the same month, including Moyallen Properties Ltd, which owed £10m to Bank of Ireland. Bank of Ireland was the secured creditor at Rushmere too, for tens of millions.

The 2019 accounts had already shown a £32m loss after asset valuations were cut by £37m. Debenhams had gone, Arcadia had gone, and Sainsbury's walked away from its lease a year early. The administrators expected no distribution to unsecured creditors.

Grant Thornton Northern Ireland ran the centre for ten months and, remarkably, opened two new stores while doing it — Primark that December, and Poundland. Stephen Cave, joint administrator and Grant Thornton's head of restructuring in Northern Ireland, put it this way when the sale went through: "All concerned have worked extremely hard over the last 10 months under our control to not just maintain business as usual but to enhance the retailer offerings at the scheme".

The sale

The centre was marketed from August 2022 by Savills and CBRE NI. A first deal fell through in September 2022. Contracts were signed on 23 December 2022 and the sale completed on 1 February 2023. The buyer was Killahoey Ltd, a joint venture between two Northern Irish businesses, Sheephaven and May Street Capital; the Irish News reported that Ian McMahon, who owns the DV8 chain — a Rushmere tenant — was involved. No split between the partners has ever been published and we are not going to imply one.

The price is reported two ways and we are printing both. Grant Thornton's announcement and the trade coverage said undisclosed. The Irish News, on 11 May 2023, reported from the administrators' filings that Rushmere sold for £46.5m against an asking price of £57m — £10.5m short. The administrators attributed the shortfall to the September 2022 mini-budget and the instability that followed, and to Sainsbury's early exit: "These factors most definitely had an adverse impact on the UK's economic stability...which ultimately adversely impacted the sale as well as the wider market." The £57m was an asking price and should never be quoted as a value.

Since 2023

The new owners spent. Over £10m went in during 2024 with, the centre said, at least £10m more from incoming tenants, and thirteen stores opened in a year. Six went into the former Sainsbury's box: in June 2024 Killahoey applied to subdivide that 50,000 sq ft unit into eight — a 24-hour gym, an office suite, three shops and three cafés or restaurants — a £1.8m scheme supporting around 70 jobs.

The results, as published: November 2024 footfall up more than 30% year on year, and a record 9 million visits across 2024. The 10 million figure put about at the end of 2024 was what the centre expected for 2025. No actual 2025 or 2026 total has been published by anyone, so 9 million is the last real number.