The Croft Retail and Leisure Park, Bromborough: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 450,000 sq ft retail and leisure park on the Wirral side of the Mersey, with free parking for over 1,200 cars, two railway stations within ten minutes' walk and a seven-screen Odeon that trades until midnight. The owner is not who most listings say it is: Park Place Retail is the letting agent, and the landlord is the Universities Superannuation Scheme. Here is what the operator publishes, where its own pages disagree with its tenants, and the four different things called "Croft" on the same road.

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

The Croft Retail and Leisure Park sits on Welton Road in Bromborough, just off the A41 New Chester Road, about four miles south of Birkenhead on the Wirral peninsula. It is a big, flat, open-air park — 450,000 sq ft of it — with the usual retail-park cast of Next, Boots, Currys, Dunelm, TK Maxx and The Range, a row of drive-thrus and fast-food units, three gyms, and a seven-screen Odeon that has been on the site since 1991.

Start with the ownership, because almost every directory gets it wrong. The name you will see attached to the Croft is Park Place Retail. Park Place Retail is the letting agent. Its own scheme page says so in the small print — it states plainly that it is "NOT responsible for management issues (e.g. car park fines, CCTV, trailers, etc)" — and that same page carries the landlord's logo. The landlord is the Universities Superannuation Scheme, the pension fund for academic and academic-related staff at British universities. CoStar reported USS letting space here in October 2015, and Urban Edge Architecture names USS as its client on both of its Croft project pages. No sale has ever been reported.

The good news is that croftretailandleisure.co.uk is a proper, server-rendered website that we could read in full. Its home page, about, find us, what's here and contact pages all load, and — unusually for a park this size — it publishes an individual page for each tenant, several of them carrying that tenant's own opening hours. Most of what follows is therefore the operator speaking rather than a third party guessing.

The second thing to get straight is that there are four separate things called "Croft" on this stretch of road. This page is about the 450,000 sq ft retail and leisure park. It is not about Redsun's 39,500 sq ft industrial and trade scheme next door, which is also called Croft Retail Park; nor about Croft Trade Park on the same road with a different postcode; nor about Croft Business Park. Figures move between all four online. We have kept them apart below.

What follows draws on the operator's own pages, the letting agent's scheme record, Wirral Council's own retail and leisure evidence base, two AccessAble access guides, the architect who has been remodelling the place for USS, and the trade press. Where two sources give different numbers we print both and say who published each. Where nobody publishes something — and here that includes the park's opening date, its footfall and its parking time limit — we say so.

This facility cinema is located at the Croft Retail & Leisure Park on the edge of Bromborough. Accommodating a total of 1,239, the cinema operates 7-days a week.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on the operator's own pages on 12 September 2026. The park-wide block — Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm, Saturday 9am to 7pm, Sunday 10.30am to 4.30pm — appears identically on five of the operator's pages: the home page, About, Find Us, What's Here and Contact. Operators contradict themselves across their own pages more often than not, so five pages agreeing word for word is worth stating. Each carries the usual rider that individual store times may vary.

The disagreement is one level down, at tenant level, and on Next it is three ways. The park-wide block says 9am on weekdays. The operator's own page for Next says 9.30am on weekdays. Next's own store locator, for Unit C2, says 9am on weekdays but 6.30pm on Saturday rather than the 7pm the park quotes. So the operator contradicts itself on the weekday opening, and Next contradicts the operator on the Saturday close. We have printed all three rows and picked none. Half an hour either side of opening is exactly the margin in which a wasted trip happens.

The Odeon row is the genuinely useful one. The cinema runs to midnight seven days a week and opens at 9.45am at weekends — four hours before it opens on a weekday, and four hours after the rest of the park has shut on any day. If you are coming for a late film, the park around you will be dark.

There are no bank holiday, Christmas or New Year hours published at all. Not as text, not as an image, not in the news section. For a park whose Sunday close is 4.30pm — early, by retail-park standards — that is a real gap. Ring 0151 334 1158 before travelling on a holiday.

Getting there

By road

Use the postcode CH62 3PN. That instruction is, word for word, the entirety of the operator's road guidance: "use postcode CH62 3PN for sat nav". No motorway junction is published by the operator or by anyone else, and we are not going to invent one. What the operator does say elsewhere is that the park is "just off the A41 New Chester Road" and "approximately four miles south of Birkenhead", and Completely Retail describes it the same way — the Wirral, the A41, four miles south of Birkenhead. Follow the A41 and the signs.

Parking — free, but read this

There are over 1,200 free spaces according to the operator, and "approximately 1,200" according to the architect who has been remodelling the park for its owner. It is surface parking, open-air tarmac, on one level, with no height restriction.

No maximum stay is published anywhere, and no enforcement company is named. That combination deserves flagging rather than glossing. The letting agent's own page refers to "car park fines" as something it does not handle — which tells you that somebody does enforce this car park — but neither the time limit nor the contractor appears on any page we could read. If you are planning a long visit, a film and a meal, look at the signage on arrival rather than trusting the word "free".

By train — the best reason to leave the car

Two Merseyrail stations are within a ten-minute walk, on the operator's own account: Spital and Bromborough Rake. Two stations inside ten minutes is unusually good for an out-of-town retail park, most of which have none.

One trap: there is also a station simply called Bromborough, which is not the one the operator names. If you are buying a ticket, Bromborough Rake and Spital are the two that count.

By bus

The operator names routes 1, 2, 40, 40A, 41, 42, 145 and 146 and directs enquiries to Traveline Merseyside on 0871 200 22 33. It does not name the stop, and it does not name the bus operators, so check the routing before you set off.

By bike

National Cycle Network Route 56 serves the park, and the operator says there are "plenty of free cycle racks available". Route 56 runs through this part of the Wirral, so arriving by bike is a real option here in a way it is not at most retail parks.

By coach or taxi

Neither coach parking nor a taxi rank is published by anybody. That does not mean neither exists — only that nobody says so.

Accessibility

There are two AccessAble guides covering this destination, and they tell rather different stories, so read both.

The park-wide guide, commissioned by Wirral Council, records 15 Blue Badge bays at 240cm by 480cm with 130cm marked transfer zones, free, on open-air tarmac, with step-free level access at the most accessible entrance and two access points on Welton Road, one of them ramped with tactile paving. It is blunt about the gaps: no toilets on site park-wide, no hearing assistance system, no designated assistance-dog area or water bowls, no wayfinding signage at all, bollards and uneven surfaces in places, and dropped kerbs at the Blue Badge bays that lack tactile paving. There are benches in the walkways and an ATM, and staff receive annual disability training.

The Odeon Luxe guide is much the better of the two, because the cinema has invested where the park has not. It has 6 Blue Badge bays at a generous 490cm by 590cm with a 120cm hatched zone, automatic double doors 193cm wide, a threshold lip under 1.5cm, and a step-free foyer — though the route from the car park is described as accessible "to a wheelchair user with assistance" because of slopes and ramps. Crucially, the Odeon has a Changing Places toilet, with an adjustable wall-mounted bench, an overhead powered hoist and non-slip flooring. That is the only Changing Places facility we could identify anywhere at the Croft, and it is inside the cinema rather than being a park-wide amenity. There is also a standard accessible toilet with 135cm lateral transfer space, and baby change in both the male and female facilities.

For film-goers, the Odeon runs a minimum of three subtitled screenings a week at off-peak times on all screens, and a minimum of two autism-friendly screenings a week on Saturday and Sunday mornings with adjusted lighting and reduced sound. Every screen has two wheelchair spaces, three in the iSense screen. Odeon's accessibility line is 0800 138 3315.

What is not published: no Shopmobility scheme, no wheelchair hire, no quiet hours and no sensory support for the park as a whole.

The shops

The operator's own directory listed 40 tenants when we counted it on 12 September 2026. The master listings that describe the Croft as a twenty-store park are out of date by half.

The anchors and the big boxes

Next occupies Unit C2 and is the largest fashion presence, with menswear, womenswear, petite, childrenswear, home and a lingerie room, plus same-day Click & Collect. Alongside it: Currys, Dunelm, The Range, TK Maxx, Argos, Boots, Smyths Toys, Pets at Home, Halfords, Poundland, Superdrug, Card Factory and The Works. Beds and sofas are unusually well represented for a park this size — Bensons for Beds, Dreams and poltronesofà at ScS all trade here.

Sport and fashion

JD Sports, Sports Direct and Footasylum give the park three sportswear operators, which is a lot for 450,000 sq ft.

Food

Burger King, Costa Coffee, Five Guys, Greggs, KFC, McDonald's, Nando's, Popeyes Louisiana Chicken and Subway. The operator's contact page also mentions a Harvester as a landmark — the management suite is "behind Nando's and Harvester" — although Harvester does not appear in its own directory.

Leisure — three gyms and a cinema

The Croft is properly a leisure park as well as a retail one. Pure Gym, Everlast Gym and Nile Wilson Gymnastics all operate here; the last is a gymnastics club rather than a conventional gym, and is the only tenant on the park you will not find on a hundred other retail parks. Wirral Council's own leisure survey found that the gyms at the Croft account for 4% of gym trips across the borough.

The Odeon has seven screens, including an iSense screen with Dolby Atmos and 4K projection, every seat reclining, an Oscar's Bar and an in-cinema Costa. The council's leisure assessment puts its capacity at 1,239 seats — the only seat count anyone publishes. Tickets start from £9.95 booked online.

Names that appear in one list and not another

This is where the record gets untidy, and we would rather show you the untidiness than tidy it away. Completely Retail's scheme record names M&S Foodhall, Wren Kitchens and InflataNation as tenants. None of the three appears on the operator's own directory as at 12 September 2026. Nor does Harvester, despite the operator itself using it as a landmark. No closure has been reported for any of them by the operator, the trade press or the local press.

The M&S one has history behind it: CoStar reported on 14 October 2015 that USS had let an 11,000 sq ft unit to Marks and Spencer at £300,000 a year, one of four lettings announced together — the same batch included Superdrug, at 4,980 sq ft and £35 per sq ft on a ten-year lease. Superdrug is still on the directory. M&S is not. What happened in between is not in any published source.

The bingo hall nobody wrote about

Wirral Council's commercial leisure needs assessment names Buzz Bingo at the Croft Retail and Leisure Park as one of only two permanent bingo halls in the whole borough, taking 36% of the local bingo market. Buzz Bingo is not on the operator's directory today, and no closure was ever reported anywhere. We cannot date its departure and we are not going to guess at one. It is worth recording simply because the council's evidence base is the only place the Croft's bingo hall exists at all.

What has arrived recently

Almost nothing about this park is covered by the trade press, and that is itself the finding. Beyond the 2015 lettings, we could not source a single dated arrival or departure for the Croft from any trade outlet, the operator's news section or the local press. Insider Media and Estates Gazette both carry material we could not read — Insider Media blocks us outright, and the Estates Gazette piece headlined "USS to refit Croft park" returned a 403. If you want to know what opened here last year, nobody has written it down.

Useful to know

The Odeon is the late-night option

The park shuts at 8pm on weekdays, 7pm on Saturday and 4.30pm on Sunday. The Odeon runs to midnight every night of the week. If you are coming for an evening film, plan to eat before the food units close rather than after the credits.

Sunday closes early

10.30am to 4.30pm is a short Sunday even by the standards of Sunday trading rules, which would permit six hours. If you turn up at four you have half an hour.

Two stations, ten minutes

Spital and Bromborough Rake are both on the operator's own ten-minute-walk list, and Merseyrail is frequent. For a park with no published parking time limit and an unnamed enforcement contractor, the train is the low-stress way in. Remember it is Bromborough Rake, not Bromborough.

Charging while you shop — with a caveat

Six 120kW rapid chargers opened on 28 May 2026, installed by Zest for Cafe Fortune at its Starbucks and Wendy's on Croft Retail Park. Ian Gill, Property Director at Cafe Fortune, said at the time that the investment would allow customers "to recharge both themselves and their vehicles during their visit". The caveat: neither Starbucks nor Wendy's appears on the operator's own tenant directory, and nobody publishes whether that drive-thru sits inside the shopping park's boundary or on the adjacent Redsun plot. The chargers are real and they are at a place called Croft Retail Park. Which Croft is not documented.

There are no park-wide toilets

AccessAble's guide states it plainly: no toilet facilities on site. The Odeon has accessible toilets, a Changing Places facility and baby change, and the food units have their own. But there is no public toilet block, and there is no wayfinding signage to help you find anything.

Things nobody publishes

We could find no confirmation of free Wi-Fi, gift cards, lost property arrangements, a dogs policy, a prayer or quiet room, a Shopmobility scheme, wheelchair hire, quiet hours, coach parking or a taxi rank. The operator does mention a click-and-collect offer and runs a news, events and gallery section, and it is on Instagram, Facebook and X as @croftretail. Absent from the website is not the same as absent from the park — if one of these decides your trip, phone 0151 334 1158 first.

Don't confuse the four Crofts

Redsun Projects' scheme, also called Croft Retail Park, is a five-acre, 39,500 sq ft industrial and trade development next door, not part of this park. Its phase one completed in the third quarter of 2024: a 24,000 sq ft unit sold to Lok'nStore Self Storage, a 14,500 sq ft unit let to Medequip Assistive Technology, and a drive-thru plot sold to Gastronomy Foods UK. Caddick Construction built it, Fletcher Rae designed it. Separately there is Croft Trade Park on Welton Road at CH62 3PQ, and Croft Business Park. If you read about trade counters, self-storage or 39,500 sq ft, that is not the shopping park.

How it got here

Nobody publishes when the Croft opened. We looked at the operator, the letting agent, the trade press, Wirral Council's retail and leisure evidence base and the local press, and there is no opening date for the retail park in any of them. That is unusual, and we would rather say so than reach for a plausible year.

What is dated is the cinema. The Odeon opened on Thursday 14 November 1991, with seven screens, and was formally opened by Sir Patrick Meaney, Chairman of Rank Leisure Ltd. The first film shown was City Slickers. Geoff Sale was the first general manager and Peter Davies the first technical manager. That places the leisure end of the site firmly in the multiplex boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the park around it is of that generation. But the cinema's opening date is the cinema's, and we are not turning it into the park's. No developer is named for the original retail park anywhere.

The ownership picture is short because nothing has happened. The Universities Superannuation Scheme is the landlord. It was letting space here in October 2015, when CoStar reported four lettings including the 11,000 sq ft Marks and Spencer at £300,000 a year and the 4,980 sq ft Superdrug at £35 per sq ft. It was the named client of Urban Edge Architecture on a project page dated March 2017. It is the landlord named on Park Place Retail's scheme page today. No acquisition date, no price and no ownership share is published anywhere, and no sale has ever been reported. We are not writing a percentage that nobody has stated.

The remodelling programme is the real story of the last decade here, and the best record of it is the architect's, not the owner's. Urban Edge Architecture describes a long-term asset-management programme for USS covering three strands:

• The leisure end — recladding and remodelling the existing cinema, plus a new purpose-built pod housing three food and beverage units totalling 4,750 sq ft, with timber louvres for solar control and a sail-like element intended to give the leisure quarter its own identity. A £600,000 budget figure appears on that page.
• Unit remodelling — stripping units G/H and J "back to the external shell (including all existing fixtures and fittings)", recladding the front elevation and rebuilding the shopfronts.
• A southern expansion — four new retail units of approximately 55,000 sq ft, two further pod units, and parking for 300 vehicles.

We cannot tell you whether the southern expansion was built. There is no date on it, no planning reference, and no confirmation anywhere that it went ahead. The architect presents it as part of a long-term strategy; the trade press has not reported it either way. Given that the operator's floor area is still quoted as 450,000 sq ft — the same figure the architect uses on the page describing the expansion — the safest reading is that 450,000 sq ft is the park as it stands, and the expansion is a proposal rather than a delivered scheme. But that is our reading, not a published fact.

One last thing about the council record. Wirral Council's own health-check assessment of Bromborough district centre — High Street, Bromborough Village Road, Allport Lane and The Precinct — does not mention the Croft at all. A 450,000 sq ft retail and leisure park sits on the edge of that centre and the council's assessment of the centre's vitality and viability does not discuss it. The Croft appears instead in the leisure needs assessment, where it is measured as a cinema, a pair of gyms and a bingo hall. It is a small thing, but it tells you how the Croft is classified locally: as a leisure destination first.