Thurrock Shopping Park, West Thurrock: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 286,277 sq ft open-air retail park on Weston Avenue at West Thurrock, next door to Lakeside, owned by British Land since 2021. It is not Lakeside Retail Park, it is not West Thurrock Retail Park and it is not Lakeside Shopping Centre — three different schemes with three different owners, two of them sharing this park’s postcode. Eight of its units and the Burger King also have consent to be demolished for a warehouse, and two anchors have quietly moved out. Here is what can be verified, where the sources disagree, and how much nobody publishes.

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

Thurrock Shopping Park is an open-air retail park on Weston Avenue at West Thurrock, in Essex, a few hundred yards from the Lakeside Shopping Centre and a short hop from the northern end of the Dartford Crossing. It runs to 286,277 sq ft across around twenty units — Decathlon, TK Maxx, Dunelm, Home Bargains, Sports Direct, Go Outdoors, Halfords, Boots and an M&S Outlet among them — with 1,646 parking spaces that nobody charges for.

Before anything else: there are five differently-named retail schemes within about a mile of each other here, and three have used the postcode RM20 3LP. This page is about the one British Land owns. It is not Lakeside Shopping Centre, the enclosed mall with more than 250 shops. It is not Lakeside Retail Park on Heron Way, which Landsec sold on 31 March 2025 for £114m. And it is not West Thurrock Retail Park — a separate 127,061 sq ft scheme on the same street, owned by DTZ Investors, where Matalan, Carpetright, Furniture Village and PureGym trade. “The retail park at Lakeside” describes at least three destinations — and this one alone has traded as The Junction, The Junction Retail Park, The Junction Lakeside Shopping Park and West Thurrock Shopping Park, names retailers still use on their own store pages today.

The most consequential fact about this park is a planning decision most write-ups miss. On 30 November 2023 Thurrock Council’s planning committee approved application 23/00033/FUL, described in its own agenda as covering “Units 1 to 8 Including Burger King, Thurrock Shopping Park, Weston Avenue, West Thurrock”, and proposing the “demolition and clearing of all existing buildings on the site to allow redevelopment for a two-story distribution warehouse”. The vote was six for, one against, one abstention. The applicant and landowner is British Land. That is a consent over part of the park — a distinction the coverage keeps losing.

And there is a hole in this page we are not going to paper over. The park’s own website, thurrockshoppingpark.com, is live and indexed — we can see its store, getting-here and contact pages listed — but it would not load for us at all, failing at the network layer on every path. So there is no operator sourcing here: no official hours, no official junction, no official parking rules, no centre phone number. What follows comes from the council’s planning file, the landlord’s leasing material, the law firm that did the 2021 deal, the warehouse scheme’s consultants, Zapmap, AccessAble and the retailers’ own store pages.

The existing retail park is peripheral and in decline and will be ready for development in 2025.

The essentials

Opening times

There is no park-level opening-hours statement here, because we could not obtain one. thurrockshoppingpark.com is the correct address and a real, indexed, live website, but every attempt to load it failed at the network layer before we reached the site. That is not the site refusing us and it is not a dead domain; it is our end of the connection. We record it because it changes what this page can honestly claim.

So we did what we do at every park whose operator goes dark: we went to the retailers’ own store pages. Three worked, and — the awkward part — all three disagree. Home Bargains opens at 8am; Sports Direct 9am to 9pm; Decathlon 9.30am to 8pm. Sunday is worse: 11am to 5pm at two, 10.15am to 4.30pm at Decathlon. Each is a retailer speaking about its own store, so each is right, and not one tells you when the park as a whole trades.

The practical advice is simple. This is an open-air park with no mall doors to be locked, so “the park’s opening hours” is a slightly artificial idea — what matters is the shop you are driving for. Ring it: Decathlon 01708 895650, Home Bargains 01708 869621, Sports Direct 0343 777 1738. Those are the only three numbers for this site we could verify, and no centre management number is published anywhere.

Our usual fallbacks did not exist here either. Next, H&M and Mango publish reliable server-rendered store pages and are our standard route into a difficult park — none of the three trades here. They are in Lakeside Shopping Centre next door, a different scheme with different hours.

Getting there

By road — and why we are not printing a junction number as gospel

Use RM20 3LP. We have a rule on this site: a motorway junction gets printed as fact only when the destination’s own operator publishes it, because a wrong junction is worse than no junction at all. Here the operator’s site would not load, so we have no operator wording to quote.

What we can tell you, attributed: the Completely Retail scheme record places the park “approximately 22 miles east of Central London near M25 junction 31”, and the historic address line retailers used here read “Off Exit 31, Weston Avenue”. Junction 31 is the Thurrock junction at the northern end of the Dartford Crossing, and it is what the whole Lakeside basin hangs off. Treat that as very likely right, and as third-party sourcing rather than the landlord’s own instruction.

If you are coming from Kent, plan for the crossing. The M25 crosses the Thames here by the Dartford Tunnel northbound and the QEII Bridge southbound, charged under Dart Charge — not a toll booth but a pay-by-the-day arrangement online or by phone. We have not checked the current price and are not quoting one. From Essex you will not touch it.

Parking

Parking is free, on a surface car park with 1,646 spaces per the leasing brochure; the law firm that acted on the 2021 purchase described “1,600 free spaces”, plainly the round-number version. No time limit is published, no enforcement or ANPR contractor is named, and no height restriction is stated by anybody. AccessAble, which surveyed the M&S Outlet here, explicitly records no height restriction and describes a shared car park with clearly marked, signposted Blue Badge bays and step-free access on the approach.

Charging is Pod Point: two devices, four Type 2 connectors at 7kW, 49p/kWh on Zap-Pay or the Pod Point app, per Zapmap. At 7kW that is a top-up while you shop rather than a fast charge. No coach parking, taxi rank or cycle parking could be confirmed — nothing says they are absent either.

By rail

The station for the Lakeside basin is Chafford Hundred (Lakeside), on the c2c line from London Fenchurch Street, roughly half an hour from town. It is built for the shopping centre: c2c says it “is directly connected to the shopping centre”, and the centre describes a seven-minute walk over a link bridge entering through Next’s second floor.

That is the mall, not this park. Nobody publishes a walking time from Chafford Hundred to Thurrock Shopping Park, and the walk between the two schemes crosses the road network feeding junction 31. If you are coming by train, plan to the shopping centre and work out the last stretch on a map.

By bus

No bus route could be verified as serving this park itself. Lakeside has a proper bus station outside the mall’s main entrance on level 1, served by Ensign Buses among others, but which services stop at or near Weston Avenue we could not establish.

The shops

The anchors

The leasing brochure describes “approximately 20 retailers” and sizes the biggest: Decathlon 40,000 sq ft, Asda Living 30,000 sq ft, TK Maxx 30,219 sq ft, Go Outdoors 23,580 sq ft and Dunelm 21,230 sq ft, alongside M&S Outlet, Costa and Burger King. The Completely Retail record adds Home Bargains 12,300 sq ft, Halfords 10,000 sq ft and Cancer Research UK 7,500 sq ft. Sports Direct holds Unit 12, with USC and GAME inside it. Poundland and Boots are named in the planning coverage.

Four are confirmed as trading by the retailers themselves rather than by the landlord: Decathlon, which gives its address as “Decathlon Lakeside, Thurrock Shopping Park, RM20 3LP”; Home Bargains, store A398; Sports Direct at Unit 12; and the M&S Outlet, which has an AccessAble guide. That is as close to a verified live directory as we could get.

Two departures — and neither was announced

Nike Factory Store has moved into the mall. The brochure lists it on this park and directories place it at Unit 1A, but Nike’s own store page now gives the address as Lakeside Shopping Centre, West Thurrock Way, Grays, RM20 2ZP, trading 10am to 9pm on weekdays, 9am to 9pm Saturday and 11am to 5pm Sunday.

Smyths Toys has moved next door. Older entries put it at “Unit 1c, The Junction Lakeside Shopping Park”; Smyths’ own store finder now gives “Unit B1a Lakeside Retail Park, RM20 1WN” — the separately owned park Landsec sold in 2025. Home Bargains, meanwhile, runs two stores in the basin, one on each park, which is an easy way to end up at the wrong one.

No dated announcement exists for either move. We looked. But both are exactly what British Land told the council would happen: retailers taking empty space elsewhere on the Lakeside estate ahead of a scheme the planning file says needs “vacant possession of the whole site” before demolition begins. That pattern is sourced from the retailers’ own websites rather than a press release, which is the strongest form this kind of evidence takes.

What is on the market, and what is not being announced

Completely Retail showed four units under offer when we checked: 5B at 10,000 sq ft, 6A at 23,580 sq ft, 8 at 3,493 sq ft and 7B at 1,500 sq ft. The 23,580 is the same as the Go Outdoors unit, which tells its own story.

We could not source a single dated shop opening at this park. Not one. A park this size normally generates a steady trickle of letting stories; this one generates almost nothing, and what coverage it attracts is about the warehouse rather than the shops. That absence is itself informative. For a park in the same county where arrivals and departures are properly documented, Braintree Village is the contrast.

Useful to know

Accessibility — one real guide, and a lot of silence

There is no operator accessibility page, no park-wide access guide, and no Changing Places toilet confirmed or denied. The only surveyed accessibility information that exists for anything on this park is AccessAble’s guide to the Marks and Spencer Thurrock Outlet, which places it “within The Junction Retail Park” — this park, under its old name.

From that guide, the park-level points: a shared car park with clearly marked and signposted Blue Badge bays, no height restriction, and step-free access on the approach to the store. Inside M&S: automatic double doors with a 185cm opening, a 100cm gap between bollards, step-free throughout, wheelchairs to borrow, a hearing assistance system at the till, the Sunflower Lanyard Scheme, and one accessible fitting room of 200cm by 220cm with a drop-down rail and chair and an emergency alarm. No ATM and no toilets in that store, and no BSL-trained staff. The guide carries no survey date we could read. Beyond that, ring the individual store — we would rather say so than pretend a park-level policy exists.

Toilets, Wi-Fi, gift cards, dogs, lost property

None of these is published for this park by anybody, and AccessAble specifically records no toilets in the M&S Outlet. Open-air parks rarely run mall-style customer services, so the realistic expectation is that facilities sit inside the larger anchors — but that is our expectation, not a sourced fact.

Eating

The leasing brochure names Costa and Burger King — and the Burger King is one of the units in the demolition application, worth knowing if it is the reason you are driving over. For a proper food offer, the restaurants are in the mall next door.

The thing to know before you go

Eight units and the Burger King have consent to be demolished, and the scheme needs vacant possession of the whole site. British Land’s planning director told the council in 2023 that the site would be “ready for development in 2025”, and the construction management plan had demolition finishing by mid-2025 and the warehouse complete by the end of 2026. It is now September 2026, four retailers are still publishing live trading hours here, and two anchors have left. We found no source explaining the gap between that programme and what is on the ground — no report that demolition has started, none that the scheme has been dropped.

So the park is open and trading. But if you are driving any distance for one specific shop here, check it is still there before you set out. That is not advice we give at most parks.

How it got here

No opening date exists, and that is the finding

We could not establish when Thurrock Shopping Park opened — not from the landlord, the agents’ particulars, Thurrock Council, the trade press or the local press. There is no opening year for this park in any public record we could reach, and we are not going to manufacture one from the year the mall opened. Thurrock Council states that Lakeside Shopping Centre opened in 1990 and now houses “over 250 retail outlets” — but that is a different scheme, and the parks that grew up around the basin followed it at dates nobody has written down in a form we could find.

The names, which are the real history here

What this park does have is a documented trail of names: retailers’ own records place it, at different times, at The Junction, The Junction Retail Park, The Junction Lakeside Shopping Park, West Thurrock Shopping Park and finally Thurrock Shopping Park. Boots still files its store page for this postcode under a “west-thurrock-junction-retail-park” address; AccessAble’s M&S survey still calls it The Junction Retail Park. No dated rebranding announcement exists, so we cannot tell you when the park stopped being The Junction — only that both names will get you here.

The word “Tunnel” keeps surfacing on this street. Completely Retail files West Thurrock Retail Park — the DTZ Investors park with Matalan and Furniture Village — under the name Lakeside Tunnel Estate, and older entries put Decathlon at “Tunnel Estate Retail Park, Weston Avenue”. The name is industrial archaeology: West Thurrock was the site of the Tunnel Portland Cement Works, photographed from the air in 1929 and 1938 and held in the Britain from Above archive. We have not verified that this park stands on the cement works footprint, and we could not resolve why British Land maintains pages named “Thurrock Lakeside Tunnel Retail Park” and “Thurrock Lakeside Extra Retail Park” — neither would render for us.

The ownership chain

British Land bought Thurrock Shopping Park in July 2021 for £82m from Nuveen Real Estate. Addleshaw Goddard acted for the buyer, led by real estate partners Lee Sheldon and Michael Scott. The firm’s note describes “1,600 free spaces”, names Marks & Spencer, Nike, Adidas and Asda among the tenants, and records that British Land saw a “clear urban logistics opportunity” at the site. CoStar’s coverage of the same purchase said British Land was keeping consents deliberately flexible with logistics in mind.

That was not idle talk. Two and a half years later British Land applied to knock a large piece of the park down.

The holding structure is named in the planning file: the applicant is Thurrock Trustee No. 1 Limited and Thurrock Trustee No. 2 Limited, acting as trustees of the Thurrock Retail Park Unit Trust. Zapmap, from a completely different direction, labels the park’s chargepoints “Thurrock Shopping Park (Thurrock Retail Park Unit Trust)”. No percentage interest in that trust is published, and we are not writing one.

What Nuveen paid, when it bought, and who originally developed and built the park are all unpublished as far as we could establish; the one promising lead, a contractor’s project page for “The Junction: Retail Park Project”, redirected and would not give up its content. British Land has not been reported selling the park since: it is still named as the owner on the scheme records we checked on 12 September 2026.

The warehouse

On 30 November 2023 Thurrock Council’s planning committee approved application 23/00033/FUL, over “Units 1 to 8 Including Burger King, Thurrock Shopping Park, Weston Avenue, West Thurrock”. The proposal, in the committee’s own words, is the “demolition and clearing of all existing buildings on the site to allow redevelopment for a two-story distribution warehouse with a total floorspace of 61,983sq metres”. The building would stand 33.6 metres high, could be run by two companies with a floor each, and could operate 24 hours. The vote was six for, one against, one abstention. Stantec, leading the consultant team, says it targets BREEAM Outstanding.

British Land put the investment at £200m and told the committee it would deliver 700 jobs — around a 150% increase on the retail park’s employment, per Your Thurrock — and £3m a year in business rates for a council with well-documented financial problems. The units named as facing demolition were Burger King, TK Maxx, M&S, Asda Home, Boots, Go Outdoors and Poundland, with the retailers expected to take empty space elsewhere on the Lakeside estate. The construction management plan is blunt about the mechanism: “Demolition works will commence following vacant possession of the whole site.”

It was not unopposed. Cllr Lee Watson, Labour member for West Thurrock and South Stifford, objected on traffic grounds, warning about heavy goods vehicles at junction 31 and lorry routes through residential roads. Two outlets reported her sentence slightly differently, so we have not printed it as a verbatim quote. The committee papers put peak traffic between 86 and 1,211 vehicles a day depending on the scenario modelled.

A note on how this has been reported. Several outlets ran the story as “Lakeside owner to demolish part of retail park”, which is misleading twice over: British Land does not own Lakeside Shopping Centre, and the consent does not cover the whole retail park. The planning register is the corrective.