Westwood Cross, Broadstairs: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

A purpose-built open-air town centre dropped between Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate on the site of a former hospital, with 1,500 free parking spaces and no time limit. The catch is next door: the retail parks that share the Westwood name are separately owned and fine you after ninety minutes — Westwood Cross says so on its own parking page. Here is what Landsec publishes, what it does not publish (including any opening hours at all), and where four different floor areas for one building come from.

Last checked 8 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Westwood Cross sits at 23 Margate Road, Westwood, Broadstairs, in the middle of the Isle of Thanet, and that middle is the whole point of it. Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate form a triangle around a patch of open ground, and in June 2005 Landsec and the Carillion Richardson Partnership put a shopping centre in the gap and called it a town centre. Thanet District Council agreed, and designated it as one.

The web address is right, which is rarer than it should be. The operator's own site is westwoodx.co.uk, it resolves, and it is this destination. The phone number on every page is 01843 867273; the managing agent's email, published through Visit Thanet and Visit Kent, is westwoodx@savillspm.co.uk — Savills Property Management.

But the site has a split personality, and it costs you the things you most want. Its parking, facilities, access and about pages served full text. Its shop directory and leisure listing both returned "0 Results". And its Getting Here page returned "BY CAR", "BY TRAIN" and "BY BUS" as bare headings with nothing underneath — fetched twice on 8 September 2026, same empty scaffold both times. So there is no operator road, rail or bus guidance on this page, because none was available to read.

The bigger trap is the name. There are three separately-owned schemes at Westwood. Westwood Cross is the shopping centre and belongs to Landsec. Westwood Retail Park and Westwood Gateway Retail Park are next door, belong to somebody else, and form part of what Savills and Completely Retail both describe as "the largest retail warehouse cluster in the UK with over 1.2 million sq ft". The parking rules are not the same on all three, and the only party that will tell you so is Westwood Cross itself, which warns on its parking page that "some of the retail parks surrounding Westwood Cross Shopping Centre impose parking fines after 1.5 hours". Nothing on the tarmac marks the boundary.

What follows comes from the operator's own pages, the architect's and demolition contractor's project write-ups, Thanet District Council's monitoring and examination papers, the local press, and a University of Leeds academic. Where sources disagree — and on the size of the building four of them do — we have printed every figure and said who published each.

Westwood Cross isn't just about shopping – it's about being part of the community and supporting the people who make it special.

The essentials

Opening times

Westwood Cross does not publish its opening hours. That is not a fetching failure. The centre has a dedicated opening-hours page, it loads perfectly, and its entire substance is a sentence saying the centre is "open 7 days a week, only closing for Christmas Day and Easter Sunday", followed by a direction to check individual venues. The only clock times on it belong to the management office. Checked 8 September 2026.

So every time in the table above comes from somebody else, and they do not agree. Visit Thanet, Visit Kent and ukmalls.co.uk all give 9.30am to 7.30pm on weekdays, 9.30am to 6.30pm on Saturday and 10am to 4pm on Sunday. Three sources agreeing is worth something — though both tourist-board listings carry the centre's own contact email, so they may all trace back to the same operator copy rather than being independent.

Next disagrees with all three. Its own store finder for Next Thanet, 35 Westwood Cross, gives 9am to 7.30pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm on Saturday and 10.30am to 4.30pm on Sunday. A tenant's own store page is normally the most reliable fallback there is, and here it is half an hour earlier every weekday morning, half an hour later on Saturday evening, and a different Sunday. We are not resolving that. If you are arriving before half nine, ring 01843 867273.

Visit Kent adds a wrinkle: the centre has zones with different hours — The Terrace, the Main Mall and Compass Leisure — without giving times for any of them. The cinema, bingo hall, casino and bowling alley trade well past 7.30pm, and the drive-throughs keep their own hours. No bank holiday, Christmas or Easter times are published by anybody; the only closure information that exists is the operator's own two days.

Getting there

By road

Use CT10 2BF, and nothing else. We are not printing a junction number, because the operator's own Getting Here page returned the heading "BY CAR" with no text beneath it on both attempts, and we will not invent road guidance the landlord has not given. There is no motorway near Thanet in any case — the M2 gives out well to the west, and the A299 and A256 carry the traffic onto the island.

Get the postcode right. Westwood Cross is CT10 2BF; Westwood Gateway Retail Park, immediately alongside, is CT10 2RQ. A satnav that lands you on the wrong one has put you in a car park that starts fining after ninety minutes.

Parking

1,500 spaces, free, and the operator publishes no time limit for Westwood Cross itself. That is unusually generous and worth saying twice, because the surrounding schemes are not the same. The car park is under CCTV and is patrolled — the operator's own wording — "by both Euro Car Parks and our own security team". Naming the enforcement contractor is rare and we are grateful for it: if you get a charge notice at Westwood Cross, you now know who issued it.

There are over 90 blue badge bays, parent-and-child bays distributed throughout rather than clustered in one corner, motorbike spaces opposite TK Maxx and in front of Vue, and cycle bays at Vue, Mecca Bingo, Thai Village, Marks & Spencer and the Management Suite. Chetwoods' 2005 design specified "car parking for 1500 cars" and the operator still says 1,500 — twenty years, not a space gained or lost on paper. No height restriction is published by anyone, and no coach parking is mentioned by any source.

Fourteen EV bays are run with RAW Charging — ten fast at 22kW, four rapid at 50kW, paid by contactless card or the ChargePoint app. Published bay counts and speeds are more than most operators manage, but they come from the operator alone; we could not cross-check against Zapmap or PlugShare.

By train

The nearest station is Broadstairs, per Visit Kent, and nobody publishes a walking distance or time from it — not the operator, not the rail companies, not the tourist boards. Margate and Ramsgate stations are also in reach, and no source ranks them or says which is the practical railhead. That is a real gap on a centre that sits deliberately between three towns.

By bus

There is a bus lay-by on site, and no source anywhere publishes a single route number. We know the lay-by exists for an odd reason: the operator's promotional-space listing offers "Site 12 (Bus Lay-by), 6m x 10m with power" as a pitch site for brand activations. So buses come into the centre. Which buses, and how often, is not published by anyone we could reach.

Accessibility

This is one of the better-equipped centres in the south-east on paper, and some of it is genuinely uncommon. The operator's access and mobility page lists wheelchair hire, accessible toilets, disabled parking, the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard, a quiet room with an autism-friendly programme, Makaton, and Convo, a live online British Sign Language interpreter service. We have not seen Makaton offered by a shopping centre before, and Convo is rarer still. A Changing Places toilet is confirmed on the facilities list, as is a male incontinence bin — Landsec signed Colostomy UK's stoma-friendly toilets campaign, and this is that campaign on the ground.

What the page does not give you is any detail. Every service is a heading with nothing beneath it: no location for the wheelchair hire, no booking arrangement, no hours for the quiet room, no location for the Changing Places toilet. There is no mobility scooter hire mentioned anywhere and no Shopmobility scheme. If any of this decides your trip, phone 01843 867273 first.

The shops

Nobody can currently count the shops at Westwood Cross, including, apparently, its owner. The About page says "over 40 fashion and lifestyle stores, restaurants, coffee shops and leisure brands"; the operator's own copy on Visit Thanet and Visit Kent says "over 60 leading brands". Its live directory returns "0 Results" to us. The Isle of Thanet News counted 53 businesses in September 2023, KentOnline 53 in 2017, and the centre opened with 31. One number to avoid: ukmalls.co.uk gives 57 and its list is stale, still containing Debenhams, Frankie & Benny's and Virgin Holidays.

The anchors

Marks & Spencer, Primark, Next, TK Maxx and Homesense are the names the operator puts at the front of its own letting material. Primark occupies a standalone unit Chetwoods designed for Land Securities after it bought the site outright, and there is a separately-built Sainsbury's by the same architect. Also here: New Look, H. Samuel, Boots, Vision Express and Clarks, with McDonald's and Starbucks drive-throughs.

Leisure — the part that has grown while the shops have not

The 2007 expansion added a cinema, a casino, a bingo hall and four restaurants, and leisure has done the heavy lifting ever since: a ten-screen Vue cinema, Mecca Bingo, a casino, a Hollywood Bowl, a trampoline park, a Loungers, an on-site hotel, and restaurants including Nando's, Five Guys, ASK Italian and Thai Village. As Dr Andy Newing put it at the centre's twentieth birthday, the flagship tenants have shifted from department stores to leisure operators.

Arrivals and departures, with dates where dates exist

• Debenhams closed in 2021. Its unit was 82,000 sq ft. AW Group stripped it out for Landsec, completing 1 June 2022 — over 170 items went to auction rather than landfill, and seven-metre steel I-beams came out of the dismantled mezzanine. Subdivided by 2023.
• Wilko closed in September 2023, in the national collapse. Iconic Jewellery was announced as closing the same month, with no date given and none reported since.
• Just Fitness opened in the former DW Fitness unit, and Westwood Dog Park opened, both reported September 2023.
• Hollywood Bowl and restaurants took the former Debenhams. A Hollywood Bowl representative indicated an autumn 2023 opening. That representative was not named and no opening was ever confirmed in print, so we are not printing a date.
• Wagamama and Bakers + Baristas — two tourist-board listings read on the same day contradict each other. Visit Thanet says "coming in 2026"; Visit Kent already calls them "new additions". We cannot tell you whether they are open.

The Clarks story, which is not the story you would expect

Clarks was scheduled to close in late 2023, reported at the time as one of three closures in the same month. That closure was reversed. As of 24 June 2025 Clarks was still trading, and LS Thanet Ltd had applied to Thanet Council to split the unit in two, keeping Clarks in one half and letting the other. The application's reasoning is a landlord saying out loud something landlords rarely write down: "The existing unit is too large for the current occupier, Clarks, and as such would be unsustainable for their continued occupancy in the long term." No application reference number appears in any coverage and no decision has been reported — the last public step is an application awaiting determination in June 2025.

Useful to know

The ninety-minute trap, and how to avoid it

This is the single most useful thing on this page. Parking at Westwood Cross is free with no published time limit. Parking at the retail parks immediately next door is not — the operator's own page warns that "some of the retail parks surrounding Westwood Cross Shopping Centre impose parking fines after 1.5 hours". Those are Westwood Retail Park and Westwood Gateway: different owners, different postcode, different rules, no fence. If you are doing Matalan, Dunelm, B&M, Iceland, Wren, Homebase, Aldi or Oak Furnitureland as well as the centre, know which car park your car is in.

Facilities the operator confirms — and does not locate

Cash machines, free WiFi, InPost and Amazon lockers, click-and-collect, a Changing Places toilet, a male incontinence bin, and dogs permitted. Gift cards are sold, lost property is open Monday to Saturday 9.30am to 5.30pm, and there is a busking programme you can apply to. None of these has a published location — the facilities page is a list of headings. We could find no confirmation of a prayer room, baby-changing, seating, coach parking or a taxi rank; absent from the website is not absent from the centre, but the operator does not say.

A town centre without a town hall

Dr Andy Newing, Associate Professor in Applied Spatial Analysis at the University of Leeds, made the observation hardest to argue with: Westwood Cross carries an official town-centre designation but has no town hall, no library and no post office. For a civic errand rather than a shop, you want Broadstairs, Margate or Ramsgate. What it is instead is East Kent's answer to a journey it is trying to prevent. The council's 2018 monitoring report said "the expansion of the offer at Westwood Cross will have led to more people staying and shopping in the District" — a polite way of saying the alternative is an hour and a half up the A299 and the M2 to Bluewater, or across the river to Lakeside. The nearest outlet shopping is Ashford Designer Outlet, about fifty miles away.

How it got here

Westwood Cross opened on 9 June 2005, on ground that had been Haine Hospital until it closed in 1997. The site was sold in 2002 and the centre was built by the Carillion Richardson Partnership and Land Securities to a design by Chetwoods Architects, creating about 1,500 jobs. Chetwoods describes what it built as "a 550,000 sqft mixed retail and leisure scheme completed in two phases" forming "the heart of a new town centre" — an open pedestrianised arcade, over thirty retail and restaurant units, a Vue cinema, offices and parking for 1,500 cars, anchored at either end by Debenhams and Marks & Spencer.

One piece of the hospital survived the demolition: a memorial wall, inscribed with the regiment numbers of servicemen treated there during the First and Second World Wars. We have not checked whether Historic England holds a list entry for it, and would rather say so than imply we looked and found nothing.

The leisure came second, in 2007, and it has been the growth end of the business ever since. Dr Andy Newing of the University of Leeds described the place at its twentieth birthday as one of Britain's first open-air shopping centres, built to combine "the accessibility of out-of-town retail with the pedestrian-friendly layout of a traditional town centre".

It worked, on the council's own numbers. Thanet District Council's 2018 monitoring report put vacancy at Westwood Cross at 2%, against a 5% target and against 23% in Margate, 12% in Ramsgate and 8% in Broadstairs. By 2019, CPRE Kent was telling the Local Plan examination there was an "overprovision of 1,461 sqm gross convenience retail floor space at Westwood Cross": a centre doing so well it had more supermarket floorspace than the district's own forecasts required.

Debenhams closed in 2021, and the 82,000 sq ft hole it left is the biggest single event in the centre's second decade. AW Group stripped the unit out for Landsec by June 2022, and it was subdivided by 2023 into a Hollywood Bowl and restaurants. The anchor that opened the place lasted sixteen years; what replaced it does not sell anything you take home.

Who owns what, and where the trail stops

Westwood Cross belongs to Landsec, held through LS Thanet Ltd. That rests on five pieces of evidence rather than one: the operator's About page names Land Securities Group as owner; LS Thanet Ltd is the applicant, "part of Land Securities, the Westwood Cross site owner", on the June 2025 planning application; AW Group names Landsec as its client on the 2022 strip-out; Landsec ran its Futures community grants here in February 2025; and the on-site InPost locker is registered as "Thanet Landsec Westwood Cross".

What nobody publishes is a number. There is no purchase price, no valuation and no ownership percentage anywhere, and the word "Westwood" does not appear in Landsec's 2025 annual report at all. That is not evidence of a sale — the report does not enumerate every asset — but it does mean we cannot put a value on the place, and we are not going to guess.

The retail parks next door have a messier history. Hammerson took a stake at Westwood in 2002, added Westwood Gateway in 2005, built a new retail terrace in 2009, and said rents rose 200% over its ownership. On 26 May 2017 it sold both parks to BMO Real Estate for £80m; David Atkins, Hammerson's chief executive, said "we continue to actively manage our retail park portfolio, realising proceeds to recycle into higher growth opportunities". They were reported as 268,000 sq ft combined then; Savills now gives 284,593 sq ft across 21 units, all let, with over 1,000 spaces.

Then, on 13 April 2023, British Land was reported to be under offer to buy both parks from Capreon for about £55m at an 8% yield. We could not confirm that the deal completed, and "under offer" is not "sold" — so we have not written British Land as the owner of anything. Nor can we explain how BMO in 2017 became Capreon in 2023; no source we found bridges those two names. The trail on the parks stops there.