Victoria Retail Park, Netherfield: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A 17-unit retail park on the A612 four miles east of Nottingham, free to park in, with B&Q and an M&S Foodhall at the big end and no public toilets anywhere on the site. Its own web address, victoriaretailpark.co.uk, no longer serves a website — it bounces you to The Crown Estate's portfolio page. Here is what the landlord publishes, where its figures disagree with everybody else's, and the several fairly basic things nobody publishes at all.

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

Victoria Retail Park sits on the A612 Colwick Loop Road at Netherfield, on the eastern edge of the Nottingham urban area and about four miles from the city centre. It is a straightforward open retail park — a terrace of big boxes, a few pods round the edges, a flat car park in front and no roof over any of it. B&Q takes about 61,000 sq ft on its own. Seventeen units, free parking, and a Morrisons next door that is not part of it.

Start with the web address, because the obvious one has stopped being a website. Type victoriaretailpark.co.uk and you are redirected, with a 302, to retailparks.thecrownestate.co.uk/victoria-retail-park. The old standalone site was real — search engines still hold deep links to pages like /stores/cardzone/ — but it has been folded into the landlord's portfolio site, and that single page is now the whole of the park's official internet presence. There is no separate opening-hours, store, getting-here, parking or contact page. The useful consequence is that the operator cannot contradict itself, because it only speaks once; the awkward one is that everything has to be cross-checked against tenants instead — and when we did that, the times did not line up.

The owner is The Crown Estate and it has not sold this one. That matters because the Crown Estate has been selling retail parks — Morfa in Swansea and Bath Road in Slough have both gone — and Victoria is in neither disposal. We checked three ways in September 2026 and all three still say Crown Estate. It bought the park in September 2010 for £56.87m, and unusually for a deal of that age the price, the date, the seller and the yield are all on the record.

What follows draws on the landlord's page, the agents' scheme records, an AccessAble audit, an architect's project page, a 2016 letting brochure, Gedling Borough Council's planning reports and heritage pages, and the local news site Gedling Eye. Where sources give different numbers we print both and say who published each. Where nobody publishes something — and at Victoria that includes the year it opened — we say so.

These deals demonstrate the enhanced leisure offering we are creating at Victoria Retail Park and our ability to attract leading names to the site is testament to our long-term strategy for the park. Restaurant brands and coffee operators are recognised footfall drivers and we are confident these will help provide a stronger, more rounded tenant mix.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on 12 September 2026. The landlord publishes its hours exactly once, on the single page it gives this park: "Monday - Thursday: 6:30am - 11pm / Friday - Saturday: 7am –8pm / Sunday: 9am - 5pm", followed by "Individual store opening times will vary."

That table is the wrong shape and we are not going to quietly fix it. As published, the park is open sixteen and a half hours from Monday to Thursday and thirteen on a Friday and a Saturday — a retail park that shuts four hours earlier on a Friday night than on a Tuesday night. Nobody publishes an explanation. Our reading is that it is a whole-site range driven by whichever tenants open earliest and close latest, not a shopping time, so treat the 11pm as belonging to a drive-thru rather than a shop — but that is our inference, not the landlord's statement. UK Malls reproduces the identical table, which is not an independent check.

Plan around the tenant rows instead — neither Next's nor B&Q's own store page matches the park table, and between them the park is fullest from roughly 9am to 8pm on a weekday. Four tenants could not be checked at all: the Marks and Spencer, McDonald's, Halfords and B&M store pages all served navigation menus and no store data, and Boots returned a flat 403. So the hours for the M&S Foodhall — the store most people time their trip around — are not on this page, because we could not read them from a source we trust.

Getting there

By road

Use NG4 2PE, or NG4 2PA. The park is on the A612 Colwick Loop Road, which the landlord describes as four miles east of Nottingham city centre. No motorway junction is published by the operator and we are not going to invent one. The A612 is the road you follow, with the Morrisons roundabout as the practical landmark.

Parking

Free, 600 spaces, and no height barrier. The landlord's wording is that "Parking is free, so you can spend all day at Victoria Retail Park and with 600 spaces, you'll never have to worry about finding somewhere to park." No time limit is stated anywhere and no parking operator or ANPR contractor is named — which cuts both ways, because nobody has published what the rules are either. AccessAble confirms no charges and no height restriction barrier, so a van or a roof box is fine, and the route to the shops is accessible to a wheelchair user unaided with no road to cross. No coach parking or taxi rank is published.

By train — read this before you rely on it

The landlord says the park is "only a 15-minute walk from Carlton and Netherfield train stations". The walk is fair enough; the trains are the problem. On Trainline's own station page, Netherfield has seven trains calling on a weekday — three towards Nottingham, four towards Skegness — and no step-free access, no ticket office and no toilets. A seven-train day will not get most people to a shop and back.

Carlton station we could not check — the page we needed timed out — so we are not going to characterise its service either way. If you are coming by rail, check the timetable for your day rather than letting the fifteen-minute walk imply a usable service.

By bus

This is the better public transport answer, and there are bike racks on site too — the landlord puts the park at a 27-minute cycle from the city centre. It names Nottingham City Transport's Lilac Line 24 and Red Line 50. NCT's own service page describes the 24 as "Victoria Retail Park to City via Carlton Hill", with the park stop named "Victoria Pk, Morrisons" — so the bus terminates at the park rather than passing near it. It began as a new direct link from Carlton on 28 January 2024, every 30 minutes on weekdays and Saturdays during the day. We could not independently confirm the Red 50, so that one is the landlord's word.

Accessibility

The park is AccessAble audited, and that audit is the most useful document anyone has published about this site: no parking charges, no height barrier, Blue Badge bays measured at 250cm by 480cm with a 120cm marked zone, tarmac, and a step-free route to the units. It also records that there are no public toilets on the park — see below.

The Crown Estate's own accessibility page carries nothing specific to Victoria — as published, its opening sentence still reads "We want everyone to enjoy a great day out at Aintree Shopping Park without difficulty", boilerplate nobody swapped per park. No Shopmobility, wheelchair hire or scooter hire is published for Victoria by anyone.

The shops

The landlord's directory listed 17 names on 12 September 2026: B&M, B&Q, Boots, Cardzone, Grape Tree, Greggs, Halfords, Hotel Chocolat, JD Sports, M&S Foodhall, McDonald's, Next, Oak Furnitureland, Pets at Home, Subway, TK Maxx and Vets4Pets. Completely Retail and the owner's January 2025 planning statement both say 17 units, so the count is not in dispute.

The big boxes

From Completely Retail's unit schedule: B&Q at 60,943 sq ft — nearly a third of the park on its own — Next at 14,311, Pets at Home 11,131, JD Sports 7,522, Boots 7,511.

What has arrived

• JD Sports, autumn 2018, into Oak Furniture Land's former unit next to Pets at Home, Oak Furniture Land having moved into a larger one.
• Hotel Chocolat, July 2024. The brand announced it itself: "Our brand-new Nottingham Victoria store is now open!"
• Cardzone — the local paper reported it open, but that report now 404s and the date is unrecoverable. B&M, Grape Tree, Greggs, Subway and Vets4Pets have no published arrival date either.

The store nobody ever named

In March 2024, Montagu Evans applied to the council for The Crown Estate to change the use of Unit R2 — Frankie & Benny's old pod, empty since 2020 — from restaurant to retail use, for an occupier employing six full-time and nine part-time staff. It did not say who, and the name was never published. Hotel Chocolat opened on the park a few months later. Nobody has connected those two facts in print, so neither will we.

What has gone

Victoria has lost a striking number of names, and the record on them is uneven. Two have proper dates: Frankie & Benny's closed in 2020 and Costa closed in 2021, the latter confirmed in the owner's January 2025 planning statement. The rest are absences rather than reported closures, and we are not going to date them: Argos, whose old Unit 5B, 17,013 sq ft, is the park's advertised vacancy today; Tesco Home, certificated in September 2005 and simply gone; DW Sports, a 45,350 sq ft unit over two floors marketed in 2016 at offers over £9m; Focus DIY, built over under a December 2008 permission; and Carphone Warehouse and Carpetright, which survive only on stale third-party listings. Not one of those five was ever announced as a closure.

And one recent, dated loss that is not a shop. The M&S café closed on Saturday 25 October 2025, one of eleven cafés Marks and Spencer shut inside smaller food shops under a £300m store-rotation programme affecting about 4% of its 316 food shops. The M&S Foodhall itself stays open — it is the café that went.

What is next door and is not part of it

The Morrisons superstore is not in the retail park — it adjoins on its own land, which is why the bus stop is called "Victoria Pk, Morrisons". The Nando's and Starbucks drive-thru were built on land "previously used as an area for car parking by Morrison's", permitted in July 2019 with 23 spaces of their own. Neither is in The Crown Estate's directory and neither belongs in the park's 17 units. A Lidl, a large Sainsbury's, a KFC and a BCA auction site are nearby and all separate.

Useful to know

Plan around the toilets

This is the one piece of advice that changes a trip here. There are no public toilets on the park. The only toilets, accessible ones included, are inside individual shops — AccessAble names Marks and Spencer Simply Food — and no Changing Places is recorded. With small children, or if you need an accessible toilet, work out which shop you are relying on before you set off, and remember it closes when that shop does. The landlord does publish free Wi-Fi across the park and a click-and-collect service.

Things nobody publishes

We could find no confirmation of a Shopmobility scheme, wheelchair or scooter hire, lockers, lost property, quiet hours, a prayer room, baby changing, a gift card, coach parking, a taxi rank, cash machines or any dogs policy. That does not mean none of these exist — only that nobody publishes them. And there is no telephone number for the park, so there is nobody to ring and ask.

The name, and a 2005 complaint about it

Gedling Borough Council's 2005 draft action plan for Netherfield recorded what occupiers had found out for themselves: "the name Victoria Retail Park doesn't convey a geographical location in Nottingham." Twenty years on that is still live — Nottingham also has a Victoria Centre, a large enclosed shopping centre in the middle of the city, four miles away. If someone says meet them "at Victoria", establish which one.

How it got here

We could not find an opening year for Victoria Retail Park, and we looked properly. Nothing from the landlord, the council, the architect, the agents, the trade press or the local news site gives one. The earliest hard planning reference is a certificate of lawfulness issued for Next on 12 June 2001, and a 2002 application describes refurbishing an already-existing "main terrace" — so the park predates 2001. Inventing a year would be worse than saying so.

What the site used to be

The ground has a far better documented history than the shops on it. Gedling Borough Council's own heritage material puts it plainly: "Once a thriving railway town, Netherfield was home to the largest freight concentration yard in Europe, built by the Great Northern Railway in 1875." The yard sent Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coal to London. And then, from the same page: "Today, the site of the old railway is occupied by the Victoria Retail Park."

The town grew out of the railway and then outlived it. The Nether Field was common pasture, enclosed in 1792; the Grantham to Nottingham railway opened in 1850; the Great Northern built its sheds and sidings in 1875 and terraces for the men who worked them. The population went from 67 in 1871 to 4,646 in 1901, and Netherfield became a township in 1885. Mills followed, and the textile women known locally as "Bourne's Angels". The marshalling yard closed in 1970, beaten by road haulage, and the major factories had all shut by 1985. The industrial past is still in the paperwork: Gedling's 2011 committee report lists "Colwick Railway Sidings" as the former use creating contamination concerns on the site.

How the park got its present shape

The planning record traces the modern park unit by unit. June 2001: a certificate of lawfulness for Next. February 2003: "part demolition, redevelopment and refurbishment of the main terrace for retail (non-food) purposes, including garden centre and builder's yard for B&Q". September 2005: a certificate for Tesco Home. July 2007: two more retail warehouse units. December 2008: Halfords extended and subdivided, and a new unit on the former Focus DIY garden centre. Then, in November 2011, the change that shaped the park's edges — permission to demolish an existing restaurant and put up three new buildings for restaurant and café use plus a relocated 325 sq m McDonald's, under a firm condition: "The buildings hereby approved shall only be used for A3 Uses and for no other purpose", imposed to protect the nearby town centres. That condition matters later.

The lettings that filled those pods were announced in June 2013, with the money attached: Frankie and Benny's took a 4,000 sq ft pod on a 25-year lease, Costa 1,500 sq ft at £30 per sq ft on a ten-year lease, and McDonald's 3,560 sq ft at £27.50 per sq ft on a twenty-year lease. The architect, Mountford Pigott, puts the whole asset-management programme at £7m, covering those restaurant units, new landscaping and a 2,800 sq m extension reconfigured around an M&S.

Within a decade, two of those three tenants had gone. Frankie & Benny's closed in 2020 and Costa in 2021, and in January 2025 The Crown Estate had to apply to lift the 2011 restaurant-only condition on Costa's 139 sq m Unit R3 so it could be let to a shop. Twelve years is not a long life for a 25-year lease.

Ownership

The Crown Estate bought Victoria Retail Park in September 2010 for £56.87m from HSBC Specialist Investments, out of the HSBC European Active Real Estate Fund, at a 5.45% net initial yield. At that date the park was described as 180,000 sq ft comprising ten retail units. HSBC's fund had bought it only in July 2009 — a fourteen-month hold, which its director Neville Paterson explained as a decision "to capitalise on the buoyant investment market for this kind of asset" once key tenants were secured. A separate trade report rounds the price to £57m and spells the seller "HSBC Special Investments"; we print the more precise figure and note the other.

The Crown Estate is a statutory corporation holding property in right of the Crown, so — unlike almost every other landlord on this site — there is no special-purpose company and no Companies House chain to trace.

It has not sold this one. The Crown Estate has been reducing its retail park holdings — Morfa in Swansea went to AshbyCapital and Bath Road in Slough to Royal London Asset Management — but Victoria is in neither disposal and no sale has been reported by anyone. Three current sources agree in September 2026: the landlord's own portfolio page, Completely Retail's scheme record naming The Crown Estate as both owner and asset manager, and its portfolio listing, which still shows Victoria among twelve Crown Estate schemes alongside Fosse Park.

Nearby, our other East Midlands pages are Riverside Retail Park in Nottingham itself, Giltbrook Shopping Park north-west of the city, and East Midlands Designer Outlet at South Normanton.