Tower Park, Poole: Cinema, Splashdown, Bowling, Parking and Opening Times

Tower Park is not a shopping park. It is a 300,000 sq ft leisure park owned by Landsec, with a Vue cinema, the Splashdown waterpark, a 24-lane Hollywood Bowl, a casino, a bingo hall, a 24-hour gym, a soft-play centre and ten food brands — and no clothes shops at all. The Tesco Extra and the B&M and Home Bargains nearby are separate schemes with separate postcodes. Here is what the operator publishes, what it does not, and why the opening hours on its own website are almost useless.

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

Tower Park sits on Yarrow Road about three miles north-east of Poole town centre, off the A3049 Dorset Way, on high ground below the water tower that gave it its name. It opened in 1989, and the shape of it has not really changed since: a big surface car park with a ring of leisure boxes around it, and a multiplex at the centre of the arrangement.

The first thing to fix is what sort of place this is. Tower Park turns up on lists of out-of-town retail parks, usually with a store count somewhere around twenty. That count belongs to three different schemes added together. The Landsec-owned destination called Tower Park has no fashion retailer, no department store and no supermarket inside it. What it has is a cinema, a waterpark, a bowling alley, a bingo hall, an adult gaming centre, a gym, a soft-play barn and ten places to eat. If you want shops, you want the neighbours — and we set out below exactly which neighbour is which.

The strongest proof of that is a negative one. Dorset Council's Poole and Purbeck Retail Study of 2015 — a document that goes through every out-of-centre destination in the borough and attaches spending figures to each — does not mention Tower Park once. It names Wessex Gate Retail Park and Fleetsbridge as the places Poole's money leaks to. A leisure park is invisible to a retail study, because there is nothing in it to measure.

The operator's own website is a problem, and we are going to be blunt about it. towerparkentertainment.co.uk renders some pages properly and renders others as a set of empty headings. Its getting here page gave us the words "BY CAR", "BY TRAIN", "BY BUS" and "BY BIKE" and not one road number, station name, bus route or distance underneath them. Its FAQ page gave us seven questions and none of the answers. Two accessibility URLs returned "Not Found". So most of the practical detail here has been rebuilt from the tenants and the letting agents' particulars, and we have said every time who is speaking.

And the cinema has changed hands twice in two years. If you have read anywhere that Tower Park has an Empire or a Cineworld, that is out of date. Cineworld shut it on 19 January 2025 and Vue reopened it on 15 August 2025. It is Vue's only cinema in Dorset.

We're thrilled to be starting the refurbishment at Tower Park. The destination has been entertaining both locals and tourists since opening in 1989, and we hope to enhance the experience for our guests by improving the outdoor environment.

The essentials

Opening times

The operator publishes one table and it is not a trading-hours table. Checked on 12 September 2026, towerparkentertainment.co.uk gives 6am to 11.59pm, identical for all seven days, followed by its own instruction: "Please check restaurant or venue pages for specific times." Those are estate hours — the window in which you can drive on and off the site — not the hours in which anything is open. A cinema does not trade at 6am and a soft-play centre does not trade at midnight.

So we went to the tenants instead. Every venue row above is the tenant's own published figure, read on 12 September 2026. Here that fallback was unavoidable: we could not find a single venue's opening time anywhere on the operator's website. Its own Vue page and its own Splashdown page both carry a description and a phone number and no times at all.

Two of the biggest draws publish nothing. Hollywood Bowl's page for this branch says its hours are being updated and asks you to ring; Vue's hours move with the programme. If your evening depends on either, ring 0844 477 0495 for the bowl and check myvue.com for the cinema.

Lemur Landings is the one to read carefully. It runs timed sessions rather than opening all day, and the term-time pattern differs from the weekend and school-holiday one — turning up at two o'clock on a Tuesday in term time means arriving in the gap between sessions.

Nothing is published for bank holidays, Christmas or New Year, by the operator or by any tenant. That is a real gap at a destination whose whole business is school holidays and wet bank-holiday Mondays.

Getting there

By road

Use BH12 4NY, and do not expect a motorway junction, because there isn't one. The nearest motorway to Poole is the M27, which ends about twenty miles east. The operator publishes no junction — in fact its getting here page publishes no road guidance we could read at all, only the heading "BY CAR" with nothing under it.

What we can source comes from the tenants and the agents. Hollywood Bowl's own directions say: "We are located off the A3049, down Ling Road." The letting particulars for the retail park next door place the whole cluster "off Dorset Way (A3049)". The operator's About page puts the park "three miles northeast of Poole".

Parking

Parking is free, on the surface, with 24-hour CCTV according to the operator. It will not tell you how many spaces there are — the phrase on its website is "plenty of car parking spaces within easy reach of the centre". Two third parties will: the letting particulars marketed by KLM say "more than 670 parking spaces" at a ratio of 10 per 1,000 sq ft, and PureGym's own page says there is "room for almost 700 cars". We have printed both and picked neither.

Nobody publishes a time limit, an ANPR operator or a height restriction. PureGym does add a warning worth repeating: "Parking restrictions may apply. Please check in the car park before you enter the gym. PureGym is not responsible for any parking fines." Read the signs on arrival — that is the only advice anyone here is actually giving you.

Electric vehicles: eight fast-charging bays operated by RAW Charging, paid by contactless card or through the ChargePoint app, with normal parking restrictions still applying in them. A Dorset guide describes them as up to 22kW and sited near PizzaExpress; that detail is the guide's, not the operator's. Motorcycles park free in ordinary car spaces.

By train

Two different stations get named and neither party is the operator. Hollywood Bowl's directions say the nearest is Parkstone, "which is 11 minutes away" — it does not say 11 minutes by what. A Dorset visitor guide points instead to Poole, "approximately 3 miles away", and Nando's says Poole station is about 15 minutes by car. No walking distance or time from any station is published by anybody. Take that at face value: if you are arriving by rail, plan on a bus or a taxi from Poole.

By bus

The buses here are morebus, part of Go-Ahead — despite the operator's own page linking you to the Arriva app, which is the wrong company for this corner of Dorset.

• Service 6 runs from Poole directly to Tower Park. morebus names it on its own Tower Park page.
• Service 26 runs Poole Bus Station to Tower Park via Oakdale Library, Canford Heath (The Pilot) and the Canford Heath Asda.
• Watch the number, not the destination. Service 25 covers the Tollerford Road variant of the same corridor and does not continue to Tower Park. The two are easy to confuse at the stop.

Nando's says the Tower Park bus stop is a three-minute walk from its door, which is the only walking time anyone publishes for anything here. No frequency table, first bus or last bus is published by the operator.

By bike

There are cycle racks. The operator says they are "outside Gala Bingo" — and Gala became Buzz Bingo nationally in 2018, and the operator's own brand list says Buzz. The racks are presumably still where they were; the wording tells you how carefully that parking page has been maintained.

Accessibility — and a real gap

There is no accessibility page on the operator's website. We tried two plausible addresses and both returned "Not Found", and no AccessAble guide for Tower Park could be found either. For a destination built around a waterpark, a bowling alley and a cinema, that is a poor showing.

What can be confirmed is venue by venue: Hollywood Bowl states there is free parking and disabled parking; Nando's lists wheelchair access and baby-changing at its own unit; Vue welcomes assistance dogs and runs accessible and autism-friendly screenings, customer services 0345 308 4620. Beyond those, no Changing Places toilet, no Shopmobility, no wheelchair hire and no count of accessible toilets or blue-badge bays is published for the estate by anyone. Ring 01202 722917 before you set off.

The shops

We counted 17 brands on the operator's own listings on 12 September 2026 — ten places to eat and seven things to do. The £2.5m refurbishment release in 2024 said "13 leisure, activity and restaurant brands" and added that more were due to open in the following months, so the two figures are consistent with each other rather than in conflict. Nobody publishes a unit count; the highest unit number we have seen named in a letting is Unit 21.

The leisure anchors

• Vue — the multiplex, reopened 15 August 2025. Its screen count is disputed: the operator's own Discover Tower Park page says 14 screens, and so does a local guide; the newspaper that covered the opening reported 10. Under Cineworld it had 16. Seating is Vue's Lux and Ultra Lux recliners, with laser projection and Dolby sound.
• Splashdown Poole — 13 indoor and outdoor flume rides plus two under-fives splash zones, one inside and one out. Some slides are seasonal. 01202 716000.
• Hollywood Bowl — 24 lanes, VIP lanes, an arcade, the Hollywood Diner and a bar showing Sky Sports.
• PureGym at Unit 1-5 — open 24 hours, over two floors, 220-plus pieces of kit.
• Lemur Landings — soft play, run in timed sessions.
• Buzz Bingo and Admiral Casino.

Where to eat

Ten brands, per the operator's own list: Nando's (Unit B3), PizzaExpress, wagamama, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, Slim Chickens, Turcuisine (Unit 18), Awaken Café and The Sweet Spot.

One naming oddity. The Turkish restaurant at Unit 18 is called Turcuisine by the operator and Turkuaz by the Daily Echo report of April 2025 that first flagged it taking the former Chiquito unit. Nobody has reconciled the two, and no opening date was published either way.

What has gone — and why we cannot date any of it

Closures here are not announced. The best evidence we could find is a letting brochure for the retail park next door, dated October 2020, which describes the adjacent leisure park as housing "Pizza Hut, Empire Cinema, Gala, Chiquito, BowlPlex, Nando's and Pizza Express". Set that against today's list and five of those seven names have gone or changed: Pizza Hut, Chiquito and BowlPlex are absent, Gala is now Buzz, and Empire's cinema passed to Cineworld and then to Vue. There is no date on a single one of those departures — the comparison proves they were advertised as neighbours in October 2020 and are not on the operator's list in September 2026, and nothing more.

What is empty

Unit 21 is on the market — 8,000 sq ft, quoted at 8,900 sq ft net internal area on 0.70 acres, built in 2005, described as a prominent standalone unit with a drive-thru and a display window, marketed by KLM Real Estate on 01202 144417. A drive-thru unit going to market is a fair indication of where a leisure park thinks its next tenant is coming from.

Useful to know

Four schemes, one road, endless confusion

This is the single most useful thing on the page. Four separately-addressed places sit within about half a mile of each other, and almost everyone — including, remarkably, Vue's own website — mixes them up.

• Tower Park, BH12 4NY — this page. Landsec's leisure park. Cinema, waterpark, bowl, bingo, casino, gym, soft play, ten food brands.
• Tower Retail Park, BH12 4QY — a separate retail scheme on the same road, about 41,600 sq ft, built in 2000. Home Bargains, B&M, Iceland and The Food Warehouse trade here. Its own letting brochure describes it as "adjacent to Tower Leisure Park", which tells you the two have always been distinct.
• Tesco Extra, BH12 4NX — Yarrow Road, Mannings Heath. Its own address, its own car park, and absent from the operator's brand list. Open 6am to midnight Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm on Sunday, with quieter shopping hours on Wednesday and Saturday from 9 to 10am.
• Poole Retail Park, BH12 1DN — not here at all. It is at Redlands, Branksome, off the A35, about a mile and a half away. NewRiver REIT bought it in October 2019: 208,000 sq ft, 14 units, 805 free spaces, John Lewis at Home, Next Home, Homesense and Boots. If a listing says "Poole Retail Park", it does not mean Tower Park.

Vue's own cinema page gives its address as "Tower Retail Park, Poole, BH12 4NY" — the wrong scheme name bolted onto the right postcode. The bus operator's page for Tower Park sells it as including "Tesco, Home Bargains, B&M". B&M's own branch is variously filed as Tower Park, Tower Retail Park and Mannings Heath Retail Park: three names, one shop, none of them this scheme.

Practical upshot: the 300,000 sq ft on this page is the leisure park alone. Do not add the retail park or the Tesco to it — and do not expect the leisure park's car park rules to apply in theirs.

An early start

PureGym trades 24 hours and the Tesco Extra opens at 6am, so there is a long window before anything else here wakes up. Tesco's own designated quieter hours are Wednesday and Saturday, 9 to 10am.

Things we could not confirm

No toilets, Wi-Fi, cash machines, lost property arrangement, gift card or quiet room could be confirmed for the estate. The operator's FAQ page does carry questions titled "Are you dog friendly?", "Do you have parcel drop off and collection lockers?" and "Is there a quiet hour at the centre?" — so the answers exist, and the page would not show us any of them. That does not mean the answer is no; it means the website would not say. Ring 01202 722917.

The water tower

What the park is named after is the water tower on high ground behind the complex, off Calluna Road. It is not part of the leisure park and no date, height or owner for it is published anywhere we could find. It holds no findable listing either — the listed water towers on Dorset's historic environment record are at Mansfield Road in Upper Parkstone and Water Tower Road in Broadstone, and both are different buildings.

If you want actual shopping

Tower Park will not give you it. Castlepoint Shopping Park, a few miles east in Bournemouth, is the mainstream fashion-and-homewares answer locally, and The Mall at Cribbs Causeway is the nearest full enclosed regional centre if you will drive up towards Bristol.

How it got here

Tower Park opened in 1989, and the source for that is the operator's own general manager: Anne Jolliffe told Dorset View that the destination "has been entertaining both locals and tourists since opening in 1989". That is the whole of the published record on the park's origins. No month, no developer, no construction cost, no opening ceremony, no consent reference. We looked for a council or planning trail and found none.

Oddly, the cinema is better documented than the park it sits in. Cinema Treasures — a crowd-sourced enthusiast database, and we flag it as such rather than treat it as gospel — records the multiplex opening on 15 December 1989 as a 10-screen AMC with 2,080 seats. It became a UCI when CIC acquired AMC in the early 1990s, then an Empire, which in November 2008 spent £5m adding six studio screens to reach 16 screens with stadium seating throughout. Cineworld took it over in July 2016 as one of five Empire sites it bought.

Then it closed. Cineworld announced the closure on 10 December 2024 and the cinema traded for the last time on 19 January 2025 — that part is confirmed independently by local news. Poole spent seven months without a multiplex. Vue reopened it on Friday 15 August 2025, with Lux and Ultra Lux recliner seating, and it is Vue's only cinema in Dorset — the next nearest is Eastleigh. Narinder Shergill, General Manager of Vue UK and Ireland, promised "a completely fresh and new big screen experience for film fans". How many screens came back is the one thing nobody agrees on: the operator says 14, the newspaper that covered the opening said 10.

The £2.5m refurbishment. In 2024 Landsec put £2.5m into the outdoor environment — better walkways, high-level decorating, new landscaping, LED lighting and more seating — as an eight-month programme by the local contractor Scope, targeting completion in spring 2025. No source confirms it finished. We are not going to tell you it did or it didn't, only that nobody published a completion.

Ownership: Landsec, and a blank where the purchase should be. Landsec owns Tower Park — the operator says so, and two trade reports in 2025 confirm it. What nobody publishes is when Landsec bought it, from whom, or for how much. There is no acquisition announcement, no price, no vendor, and Landsec's own website has no property page for it.

There is one ownership episode on the record, and it is a non-event nobody ever closed off. In October 2019, Land Securities was reported to be selling a 95% stake in the X-Leisure Unit Trust to CIT Partners for £650m, with Xscape Milton Keynes, Xscape Castleford and Brighton Marina named in the coverage. Land Securities declined to comment. Tower Park was never named in that story, and no source anywhere links Tower Park to X-Leisure. Six years on, Landsec still owns all three of the parks that were named, so whatever was being discussed plainly did not happen as reported — and no source says the deal was abandoned. It simply stops.

The professional team was rebuilt in 2025. On 16 September 2025 Landsec appointed KLM Real Estate as joint leasing agents alongside the incumbent CBRE across three leisure parks — Xscape Milton Keynes at 420,000 sq ft, Xscape Yorkshire at 430,000 sq ft and Tower Park at 300,000 sq ft — which between them draw more than 12 million visitors a year. Oli Marcroft of KLM said the schemes each had "strong anchors and a diverse mix of operators". In December 2025, Workman LLP was appointed to manage a 14-site Landsec retail and leisure portfolio that explicitly includes Tower Park, with Nick Hilton, a Partner at Workman, calling them "well-used parks". That single September 2025 release is the only place the 300,000 sq ft figure exists — one line in one announcement is the entirety of what is published about the size of a park that has traded for thirty-seven years.