Telford Forge Shopping Park: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A Sainsbury's-anchored retail park on Colliers Way at Old Park, on the edge of Telford town centre, bought by British Land in October 2024 and described by the buyer as "immediately adjacent to Junction 5 of the M54". It goes by at least three names — Telford Forge Shopping Park, Telford Forge Retail Park and Forge Shopping Park — and they are all the same place. Its own website could barely be read when we checked, because the site is serving a broken TLS certificate. Here is what could be sourced, who published each figure, and what nobody publishes at all.

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

Telford Forge Shopping Park sits on Colliers Way in Old Park, on the western edge of Telford town centre. It is anchored by a large Sainsbury's, with Currys, Boots and Next alongside, and it has traded since 1998. The postcode to aim for is TF3 4AG.

Start with the name, because it is the single biggest source of confusion about this park. The operator's own website titles its pages "Telford Shopping | Telford Forge Shopping Park", and British Land calls it that in its regulatory filings. But almost every tenant and the entire local press call it Telford Forge Retail Park — that is the wording in Next's own store address, in Boots' listing, and throughout the Shropshire Star and Telford Live. Currys uses a third version, Forge Shopping Park. One aggregator even carries two separate database records for the two main names, with the same postcode, owner and floor area on both. There is one park here, not two.

There is, however, a genuinely separate park a couple of minutes' walk away, and it matters. Telford Bridge Retail Park, TF3 4PB, is a different scheme, also off Colliers Way at Old Park, and B&Q is at Telford Bridge, not at the Forge — a letting brochure and two opening-hours directories all place it there. Telford Centre, the enclosed town-centre mall, is a third destination again, with its own owner and EV hub. Nothing here is about either of them.

The operator's website is live, correct and almost unreadable. www.telfordforge.co.uk is the right address, but every attempt we made to read it but one was refused — not by a robots rule, but because the server's robots.txt is served behind a self-signed, misconfigured TLS certificate. Everything an operator would normally supply, from its hours table to its phone number, is therefore missing here, and the usual Internet Archive fallback was itself blocked to us on the day.

What follows draws on British Land's regulatory announcement of the acquisition, the letting agents' listing, the Sainsbury Archive, a 2014 council retail study, the local press, a Parkopedia car-park record, an AccessAble survey of one shop, and the tenants' own store pages. Where sources disagree — on the size, the store count, the hours and even the build year, they do — we print each figure and say who published it.

Parks remain the preferred format for retailers and we have deployed £711m of capital into this subsector since 1 April 2024.

The essentials

Opening times

There is no readable park-wide hours table, so every row above is a tenant's hours, not the park's. That is deliberate: the operator's site could not be read except for a single store page, and averaging the tenants into an invented park time would be worse than useless.

Sunday is disputed. The operator's own Next store page — the one page of telfordforge.co.uk that loaded for us — gives 10.30am to 4.30pm, and Currys gives the same. Next's own website gives 10am. England's Sunday trading rules cap a large store at six hours, and 10.30 to 4.30 is exactly six hours while 10 to 4.30 is not, so the 10am is most likely a browsing time before tills open. We have not resolved it. Saturday closing is disputed too — 7pm at Next, 6pm at Currys — but that one is simply two shops doing different things.

A third set of hours exists — ukmalls.co.uk publishes 8am to 8.30pm Monday to Saturday — and is not printed here, because it agrees with no tenant and no operator page. One useful detail from the crowd-sourced car-park record, though: the car park itself is open from 7am and until 10pm Monday to Saturday, long before and after the shops trade. All checked on 12 September 2026.

Getting there

By road

Use TF3 4AG. Unusually for a page like this, there is a motorway junction we are willing to print, and it comes from the strongest kind of source: the owner, in a regulatory filing. British Land's announcement of 2 October 2024 describes the park as "prominently located west of Telford town centre, and immediately adjacent to Junction 5 of the M54". That is the buyer describing an asset to the market, so M54 Junction 5 is the one to aim for.

One wrinkle: British Land says "west of Telford town centre", the Shropshire Star calls it a "Telford town centre retail park", and a journey-planning app files it under Ketley & Overdale. It is in the Old Park / Malinslee area on the town-centre edge, and the postcode settles it better than any of those.

Parking

Free, with a five-hour maximum stay, 1,300 spaces, and no height restriction. Enforcement is by Horizon Parking Ltd and the park holds a Safer Parking Award. Every word of that comes from Parkopedia, which is crowd-sourced, because the operator publishes nothing we could read — and a second aggregator contradicts itself, giving "1,000+" spaces on one record of this park and "1,200 free" on its duplicate. Treat the five-hour limit as real until you can check the signs; that is the sort of thing enforced by camera. No coach parking, taxi rank or cycle parking is confirmed by anyone.

By train

Telford Central is the station, and it is not a walkable railhead. A journey planner gives the walk as 54 minutes; services are run by West Midlands Railway and Transport for Wales. No operator-published distance or time exists, so that is a third-party estimate — but the order of magnitude is the point. Take a bus or a taxi from the station, or drive.

By bus

The stop "Old Park, adjacent to Park Lane" (NaPTAN 3590E072600) is on Colliers Way by the retail parks and is served by the 99C, an Arriva Midlands North circular. A journey-planning app also lists routes 5E, 99C and 99A, and gives the nearest stop as "Bridge Retail Park", 113 metres away — a neat illustration of how close the two parks are, and why their names keep getting blended. There is no operator bus information at all, so check the routes before relying on them. Nothing is published about cycling here either.

Accessibility

The only access survey that exists here is of one shop. AccessAble has a guide to the Next store, and because Next has no car park of its own — AccessAble says so explicitly — that guide doubles as the only detailed description of the park's car park anywhere. Its survey date is not stated.

On the car park: shared, open-air, tarmac, 10 or more Blue Badge bays at 360cm by 490cm, free, with a dropped kerb and tactile paving, but no 120cm hatched buffer around the Blue Badge spaces, which matters if you use a side-loading ramp or hoist. An undated Parkopedia user review complains that "disabled bays are rare as hens teeth" — a user comment rather than a fact, but consistent with that layout note. Currys separately says its own store "has a number of extra-wide parking bays".

Inside Next: a lift to the first floor with Braille, tactile markings and an audible announcer, and the accessible toilet on the first floor in the Costa area, step-free via that lift. The detail there is mixed — grab rails both sides and a sensor tap, but an 88cm door that is heavy and manual, low lighting, an emergency alarm whose cord is out of reach, and no unobstructed 150cm by 150cm turning space. Baby changing is a fixed table at 76cm. There is hearing assistance at several till points but no lowered till sections, and the survey flags shiny floors and confusing patterns.

There is no park-wide access guide, and no Changing Places toilet is mentioned by anyone. Nor could any Shopmobility scheme, wheelchair hire or quiet hours be sourced for the park as a whole.

The shops

No single readable store directory exists for this park. The operator has one — indexed category pages and a park map are visible in search results — but it could not be read. What follows is compiled from the letting agents' listing, two planning statements, a 2014 council study, an aggregator and the tenants' own store pages.

The anchors, and who else is listed

The letting agents describe the park as anchored by Sainsbury's, Currys, Boots and Next, and British Land's own announcement calls it "anchored by Sainsbury's". The Sainsbury's unit is 63,476 sq ft.

The same page, read 12 September 2026, adds Furniture Village (12,163 sq ft), Bensons for Beds (12,144 sq ft), poltronesofà at ScS (12,187 sq ft) and TUI, with two units marketed as available — Unit 5A at 12,918 sq ft quoting £378,741, and Unit 6 at 10,328 sq ft. An aggregator adds TK Maxx, Frankie & Benny's and McDonald's, and there is a Costa inside the Next store, from the operator's own page.

A tenant list you should not trust

The December 2025 planning statement submitted for British Land names Sainsbury's, Next, Decathlon, TK Maxx, Superdrug, Currys, B&M, Nuffield Health, McDonald's and Five Guys at the park. Decathlon closed on 3 November 2024, more than a year before that statement was written — which is exactly why a planning agent's tenant schedule should never be read as a shopping directory.

Two names we cannot place

Halfords appears in a third-party listing as "Unit 1, Telford Forge Retail Park" — but with the TF3 4PA postcode rather than the anchors' TF3 4AG, and Halfords' own store page returned no address at all. Starbucks has an Instagram account calling itself "Starbucks - Telford Forge Retail Park", which is social media, not a store finder. Given that B&Q turns out to be at Telford Bridge next door, treat both the same way: possible, unconfirmed, quite possibly at the neighbouring park.

Who has gone

• Decathlon — opened 2018, closed 3 November 2024, after a review of the store network following a brand refresh. Michael McHale, Decathlon UK's regional leader, told the Shropshire Star in October 2024: "We're saddened to be closing our Telford store, which has served the local community for over six years." Customers were pointed at Wednesbury.
• Outfit — gone, and confirmed gone, because Poundland took its unit: signage consent to replace Outfit's two illuminated fascias was reported in August 2023. No closure date for Outfit and no opening date for Poundland was published.
• Dunelm Mill, Laura Ashley and Carphone Warehouse — all three were at Telford Forge in the council's February 2014 retail study and none appears on any current listing. No closure date exists for any of them, so they are written here as names on the 2014 list that are not on any current list, and nothing more.

The live planning issue: the units are too small

The running story here is unit size, and it spans both owners. In February 2024, before British Land bought the park, the then-owner's vehicle Corona Vulcan Telford Ltd applied for a rear extension forming a 465 sq m external garden centre in the service yard (TWC/2024/0014, consultation closed 28 February 2024), alongside a plan to amalgamate units 2, 3 and 4 — then ScS, Bensons for Beds and Furniture Village — into one building capped at 5,574 sq m. The stated aim was to secure the long-term occupation of the units for larger-format occupiers needing outside space.

In December 2025, British Land's agent Montagu Evans lodged TWC/2025/0865, asking to raise the cap on a single occupier from 5,574 sq m (60,000 sq ft) to 6,503 sq m (70,000 sq ft); Sainsbury's is not subject to the cap. The applicant's reasoning, verbatim: "Interest is increasingly being driven by larger format retail operators who typically require greater internal floor areas to support their operational models". It changes neither the total floorspace nor the goods that may be sold. No decision could be found, so as at 12 September 2026 treat it as undetermined.

Useful to know

Charging a car here: not yet

Sixteen InstaVolt charge points have been approved and none is confirmed built. Application TWC/2026/0203, by InstaVolt Ltd, covered 16 charge points plus a feeder pillar, a CCTV post and a substation on a 23 sq m site. It was lodged on 12 May 2026 and approved on 2 July 2026, with trees to be removed and replacement planting required; InstaVolt said its "design has been carefully considered to minimise any visual or environmental impact".

But as at 12 September 2026 nothing at this park appears on Zapmap — a Telford search returns Telford Shopping Centre, Saba UK Telford Central and Tesco Extra Telford, not the Forge. Approved is not built. Do not arrive on a low battery, and do not confuse this with Telford Centre's separate hub in the town centre.

Things nobody publishes

For the park as a whole we could confirm no Wi-Fi, lost property, dogs policy, quiet hours, prayer room, cash machines, Shopmobility, wheelchair hire, Changing Places toilet, coach parking, taxi rank or cycle parking. That is not the same as saying none of them exists — the operator's pages could not be read, and no third party fills the gap.

Other West Midlands parks and centres

If the Forge does not have what you need, the region's larger destinations are Merry Hill at Brierley Hill, the Designer Outlet West Midlands at Cannock, Gallagher Shopping Park at Wednesbury — where Decathlon pointed its Telford customers when it closed — and Bentley Bridge Retail Park at Wednesfield. British Land also owns Elliott's Field Shopping Park at Rugby, which came in the same seven-park deal as this one. And if a search sends you to The Forge Retail Park, that is the Glasgow one — add TF3 4AG to the search.

How it got here

The park opened in 1998 and Sainsbury's built it. The Sainsbury Archive's catalogue record for "Images of The Forge retail park, Telford" lists the branch as "The Forge, Colliers Way, Telford (1998-present)", states that it was "developed by J Sainsbury Developments Ltd", and dates the photographs to 21 August 1998. The same record shows an earlier Sainsbury's at Colliers Way trading from 1990 to 1998 on the same site — so the supermarket came first and the park was built around its replacement. One aggregator gives 1996 and cites nothing; a company's own archive, with dated photographs, is the better record.

The name is industrial, and so is the district

Old Park sits on the east Shropshire coalfield. The Historic Environment Record entry for Old Park Iron Works at Lawley and Overdale reads: "The Old Park ironworks was built in 1790 by Thomas Botfield. Forges, mills, and a third blast furnace were soon added to the two original furnaces. By 1806, it was the largest ironworks in Shropshire and the second largest in Britain." On its present state it is blunt: "The area has been completely cleared and is now mainly grass covered. No structures are visible."

We are not going to tell you the retail park stands on the ironworks. The grid reference is in the same area and the park is called the Forge, so the temptation to join them is obvious — but no source we read connects the two footprints, and the record itself makes no such claim. Treat the ironworks as the district's history rather than the site's.

The park in the council's evidence base

Telford & Wrekin Council's Retail & Leisure Capacity Study and Health Check, by WYG Planning and Environment in February 2014, is the most detailed public description of the park at any date. It names Currys/PC World, Carphone Warehouse, Dunelm Mill, Laura Ashley, TK Maxx and Sainsbury's as the occupiers, and records Telford Forge as taking "the greatest proportion of the electrical goods market share at 30.5%" in the borough — which explains the shape of the place.

Ownership

British Land bought the park on 2 October 2024, as one of seven acquired from Brookfield for £441m — about 1.9 million sq ft at a 6.7% net initial yield, 7.2% topped up. The seven, in the announcement's own order, were Elliott's Field Shopping Park Rugby, Central Retail Park Falkirk, Wellington Retail Park Waterlooville, Ravenhead Retail Park St Helens, Cleveland Retail Park Middlesbrough, Telford Forge Shopping Park Telford and Chilwell Retail Park Nottingham. The park-level figures in that announcement are the best performance data anyone has published about it: c.301,000 sq ft, 12% of the portfolio's gross asset value, net operating income of £3.1m at £10.27 per sq ft, and 96.2% occupancy. Two further announcements the same day funded the deal, a placing and a PrimaryBid retail offer; the raise is itself reported two ways, £301m and €359m, on what look like different bases, and the two are not reconciled.

British Land is still the owner. We searched for a sale in 2025 or 2026 and found none; the letting agents' scheme page still names British Land as owner and asset manager, and Telford Live still described it as the owner in December 2025. On the corporate plumbing, Brookfield held the parks through vehicles named "Corona Vulcan", renamed "BL" after completion — Companies House turns up BL Wellington, BL Chilwell, BL Falkirk, BL Middlesbrough and BL Ravenhead, one per park. The Telford entity was not isolated by name in the result we read, although the applicant on the February 2024 garden-centre application was reported as Corona Vulcan Telford Ltd. No company number was verified for it, so none is printed here.

And there is a twenty-six-year hole in the middle of the story. Sainsbury's developed the park in 1998, Brookfield held it until 2024, and who owned it in between is not established by anything we read.