Whiteley Shopping Centre, Fareham: Shops, Parking, Directions and Opening Times

An open-air town square built on the bones of a failed factory outlet village, half a mile off M27 Junction 9 between Portsmouth and Southampton. Four of the operator's own pages agree on the opening hours and its tenants confirm them, which is rarer than it should be. The same website then names two different car park enforcement companies, two different car park opening times and three different accounts of the electric vehicle charging. Here is what British Land publishes, where it disagrees with itself, and what nobody publishes at all.

Last checked 10 September 2026 · Opening times and store lists change — check with the centre before travelling.

Whiteley Shopping Centre stands on Whiteley Way in the planned settlement of Whiteley, north of Fareham and roughly midway between Portsmouth and Southampton. It is an open-air scheme built around a town square rather than an enclosed mall, and it opened in its present form on 23 May 2013 after the factory outlet village that stood on the site was demolished. Marks and Spencer anchors one end, a Tesco superstore with its own petrol station sits at the other, and a nine-screen Cineworld with a run of restaurants was added on adjacent land in 2015.

The website in our master list is correct and it works. whiteleyshopping.co.uk is properly server-rendered and every page we asked for came back with real content. That is not something we can say about most operators, and it means most of what follows is British Land speaking rather than a third party guessing. The exception is a strange one: the page called "Getting Here — Directions" contains no directions — an address, a phone number and a postcode-lookup widget, and nothing else. The junction and the bus and rail details below had to be lifted from the About page and the FAQs.

The owner is British Land, and the joint venture that built the place has vanished from the record without anybody announcing it. Whiteley opened in 2013 as a joint venture between British Land and the Universities Superannuation Scheme, and every account of the opening says so. Since March 2018 the Companies House chain has been wholly British Land. No filing, no announcement and no trade-press report says when USS left, or whether it left at all. We have set that out in full below rather than pretending it is settled.

What follows draws on eleven of the operator's own pages, British Land's filings and case study, two letting agents' listings, two council retail studies, the engineers' project pages, the Portsmouth News and Companies House. Where sources disagree we print both. Where nobody publishes something — and at Whiteley that includes the floor area, the footfall and any height limit — we say so.

The recently redeveloped Whiteley Village has become a popular comparison shopping destination attracting a reasonable market share of expenditure from Fareham Borough.

The essentials

Opening times

Checked on the operator's own pages on 10 September 2026, and this is the strongest hours position we have found on any destination. Four separate pages on whiteleyshopping.co.uk — the homepage, the opening times page, the About page and the FAQs — give exactly the same times: 9am to 7pm Monday to Saturday and 10.30am to 4.30pm on Sunday. Operators contradict themselves about their own hours on most sites we read. This one does not.

Two tenants then confirm it independently: Next in Unit B1 and H&M in Unit A5 both publish the identical set, while Tesco, trading on its own hours as supermarkets do, opens two hours before the centre and closes three after it. When the landlord and two national multiples agree to the minute, you can plan around it.

There is one dissenting source and we are printing it rather than burying it. Visit Hampshire, the county tourist board, publishes a weekday close of 8pm, an hour later than everybody else. The same listing also says parking is "free for up to three hours", an hour short of what the operator says. Two errors on one page is enough for us to treat it as the odd one out, but if you are counting on a late weekday visit, ring 01489 566000.

The operator adds that "Food and leisure will be open later – please check retailer websites for further details", and that is the whole of its guidance on the restaurants and the cinema. Festive hours are a blank: no bank holiday, Christmas, New Year or Easter times appear anywhere on the site in any format. This is not us failing to read something; it is nothing being published.

Getting there

By road

M27 Junction 9, then follow signs for Whiteley. Satnav PO15 7PD. We print that junction because the operator publishes it: its About page says the centre is "Located between Portsmouth and Southampton, off Junction 9 on the M27". The letting agents put it more precisely, at half a mile north of M27 Junction 9. What the operator's own Getting Here — Directions page publishes is nothing at all — an address, a phone number and a postcode-lookup widget.

Parking

Parking is free for four hours, after which you can top up for £3 to get a further two, and there is no tariff at all between 6pm and midnight, so an evening at the cinema or a restaurant costs nothing to park for. There are seven car parks — East, South, North, Cinema A, Cinema B, Market Square and Tesco — all with CCTV; the PayByPhone location number is 79433; Tesco has a four-hour maximum until 6pm and Market Square is one hour only. How many spaces there are depends on who you ask: "over 1,360" and "over 1,300" on two operator pages, a precise 1,359 from McMullen Real Estate, and 1,500 in the coverage of the 2013 opening.

Who enforces it is genuinely unclear, and this matters if you get a ticket. The operator's parking page says the car parks are "monitored by Group Nexus". The operator's car parks page says "All of our car parks are monitored by Car Park Plus". Two different companies, two pages of the same website. We are not picking one — read the notice itself for the issuer.

No height restriction is published for any of the seven car parks. What the FAQ says is blunt: "Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate large vehicles, vans, motorhomes or coaches in our car park." Take that as the size rule, and note there is no coach parking.

Blue Badge spaces are in the East, Cinema A, Tesco and Market Square car parks. Parent and child spaces and motorcycle bays are each described differently on two operator pages.

Electric vehicle charging

There are 7kW Type 2 Mennekes posts, and beyond that the operator's accounts do not line up. The parking page puts charging in the East car park at 49p per kWh; the car parks page describes three posts across East and Cinema B; the FAQ names the network as Pod Point. British Land's own case study refers to "free electric car charging points", flatly contradicting the 49p on the live page.

By train and bus

Swanwick is the station, and the operator says it is a 25-minute walk — the only walking time anybody publishes, and the operator spells it "Swanick" in its own FAQ, which will not help you find it. No train operator, no frequency and no step-free information appears anywhere. The 28 and 28a stop on Whiteley Way, and that is the entirety of the published bus provision: one sentence in the FAQs, no operator named, no frequency, no other route mentioned by anybody. For a destination this size, it is fair to say the place was designed around the car park. There are bike loops in every car park and, British Land says, more than 200 cycle spaces.

Accessibility

Whiteley is an open-air, largely level scheme, which is the single biggest thing in its favour for anyone with mobility difficulties — no multi-storey mall to navigate and no lift to queue for. There is a Changing Places facility in the East car park, with a height-adjustable bench, a ceiling hoist and adjustable wash basins; accessible toilets are next to Market Square, and wheelchairs can be hired from the Centre Management offices against ID. What is not there, in the operator's own words: "Unfortunately we do not offer mobility scooter hire," and "Unfortunately there is no Quiet Room at facility at Whiteley." We have quoted the second as written; no Shopmobility is mentioned anywhere.

The shops

We could not take a live count of the store directory. The operator's Eat, Drink & Shop page loads properly but renders only its first fourteen names before hiding the rest behind a "See More" control we cannot operate, and the centre map is a PDF. The list below is assembled from operator pages of different vintages plus third parties, and some of these names will have gone.

The anchors

Marks and Spencer, at 60,000 sq ft, has anchored the scheme since it opened. Tesco runs a superstore with its own petrol filling station, a Costa and an F&F department. Next occupies Unit B1 at around 1,810 square metres and H&M Unit A5; River Island is named by the operator. The leisure anchor is a nine-screen Cineworld with 1,416 seats.

Who else is here

Readable on the operator's directory: Accessorize, Amparo Lounge, Baja Mexicali, Bar + Block, Beaverbrooks, Boots, Burger King, Caffè Nero, Card Factory, The Fragrance Shop and Wetherspoons. Named elsewhere by the operator or by third parties: FatFace, Mamas and Papas, Clarks, Flying Tiger Copenhagen, Joules, Moss Bros, Starbucks, Harvester, Nando's, Five Guys, PizzaExpress, Wagamama, Yo! Sushi, and Rock Up, the indoor climbing centre.

One dated arrival, and only one

Pets Corner is the single dated letting we could source anywhere. It appears in British Land's Final Results announcement of 17 May 2023, in a list of "new brands at our Retail Parks, including Pets Corner at Whiteley and Black Sheep Coffee at Broughton". Thirteen years of trading, one dated arrival on the public record.

Departures: nothing is dated, and the operator gives the game away

We could not source a single dated closure at Whiteley — no operator statement, no trade-press note, no local round-up. What we can point at is a tell: the operator's own About page still names Topshop as one of its example brands, and Topshop's UK stores all closed in 2021. That page has not been updated in at least five years, and the restaurant list on it, described as "six new restaurants", is the 2013 opening set. We are not writing that up as a Whiteley closure, because nobody has published one.

The scheme was "over 90% let to national brands" when it opened, and one unit — E4, at 2,290 sq ft — was under offer on the agents' listing on 10 September 2026. British Land's widely reported 99% occupancy is a portfolio figure across all its retail parks, not a Whiteley one.

Useful to know

The evening is free

There is no parking tariff between 6pm and midnight. With the cinema, Bar + Block, Harvester, Wetherspoons, Amparo Lounge and the rest trading past the shops' 7pm close, an evening here costs nothing to park for. That is the single most useful thing on this page. At the other end of the day, Tesco opens at 7am and its petrol station at 6am, well before the shops.

Dogs, money and babies

Dogs are welcome "in all outside areas, and in some stores", which an open-air scheme makes easy; bowls are provided and Starbucks does free Puppaccinos. There is one cash machine, outside Tesco, which the operator says is withdrawal-fee free, and no centre gift card at all — "many of our retailers offer their own individual giftcards" instead. For feeding a baby the operator points at a tenant: Mamas and Papas has "a fully air-conditioned feeding room on their first floor".

Things that are not there

No Wi-Fi: "Whiteley Shopping does not currently offer Wi-fi access for customers." No coach parking, no large vehicles, vans or motorhomes, no mobility scooter hire and no quiet room — the operator states each of those absences outright, which is more honest than most. No Shopmobility, prayer room or lockers are mentioned anywhere. Lost property is at the Centre Management Office by Market Square, staffed only 9am to 4pm on weekdays. The Changing Places facility in the East car park is a real plus, though: a lot of destinations this size still have none.

Do not confuse it with the other Whiteleys

"Whiteleys" in Bayswater, London W2 is a completely different place — the former department store, redeveloped as The Whiteley. It dominates search results for the name and has nothing to do with Hampshire. Whiteley Village in Surrey is a third unrelated thing, and within Whiteley itself Gull Coppice Local Centre is a separate small parade the council assesses on its own.

If Whiteley does not have it

Hampshire is unusually well served and the alternatives are within an hour. WestQuay in Southampton is the region's big enclosed mall, west along the M27; Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth is the outlet centre, a similar distance east; Festival Place at Basingstoke is the other large Hampshire centre, further north. Whiteley's pitch against all three is that it is open-air, four hours of parking are free, and you are not paying to leave the car after six.

How it got here

Whiteley is a planned settlement, not an old village. Fareham Borough Council describes it as a growth area for South Hampshire laid out for about 6,000 residents, with a business park, a golf course, schools and a "woodland setting...retained to provide a framework for development". Its retail element was a factory outlet centre, and it failed — though you would not know it from Fareham Borough Council's own tourism page, which still describes the village as containing "a range of 'factory outlet' shopping, a small supermarket and a range of community facilities", thirteen years after the outlet centre was demolished and the small supermarket became a Tesco superstore. Whiteley Village outlet centre opened in 1999 at a cost of £60m; by the late 2000s the Portsmouth News describes it as a struggling venue with minimal foot traffic and an inconsistent tenant mix, and its retrospective of 20 May 2026 uses the phrase "ghost town" in the headline. British Land bought in during May 2007, taking a 50 per cent interest for £27m; its solicitors' record describes the site then as roughly 220,000 sq ft of retail plus leisure and offices.

The planning fight most write-ups miss

The planning authority for Whiteley is Winchester City Council, not Fareham Borough Council — even though the postal address is Fareham and Fareham is the borough whose town centre the scheme competes with. In 2007 the landowner, Whiteley Co-ownership, put its redevelopment proposal to Winchester and Fareham Borough Council objected, on the ground that a rebuilt Whiteley would draw trade away from Fareham town centre. It was approved anyway, and Fareham's objection turned out to be well founded: its own consultants said so in the measured language of the study quoted at the top of this page, and by 2020 they had Whiteley climbing 28 places up the national Venuescore ranking while Fareham town centre's position declined. We could not obtain the Winchester planning reference.

Demolition and rebuild

The outlet centre closed in June 2011, was demolished, and the replacement opened on 23 May 2013 at a cost of £84m: 320,000 sq ft, 58 shops and restaurants, a 60,000 sq ft Marks and Spencer, over 90 per cent let to national brands, 1,550 jobs created or supported and £59m of Gross Value Added. It was the first shopping centre in the country to achieve a BREEAM 2008 "Excellent" rating, a claim made independently by British Land, Enborne Projects, Evolve Consulting Engineers and the letting agents. Main contractor McLaren Construction; architect Corstorphine + Wright.

The best explanation of why the place looks the way it does comes from the structural engineer, not the architect. Evolve's case study says the double-height, eight-metre, frameless glazed shop fronts had to be designed with no rear support for the first three metres, so retailers could display merchandise right up against the glass without a column in the way. That is why the units read as tall glass boxes rather than a conventional parade.

Cineworld opened on 19 November 2015, nine screens and 1,416 seats, on adjacent land with a run of restaurants — a deliberate copy of Glasgow Fort, as British Land's half-year report of 16 November 2017 explains: analysis of the leisure extension there "resulted in our commitment to similar developments at Whiteley, Broughton and Fort Kinnaird".

The ownership question nobody has answered

Whiteley opened as a joint venture between British Land and the Universities Superannuation Scheme. The trade coverage, Retail Week's description of the landlords and Enborne Projects — which still names its client as the "British Land / Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) JV" — all say so, and Charles Maudsley for British Land and Graham Burnett for USS were quoted at the opening. No source states the split. The only ownership percentage ever published for this site is the 50 per cent British Land bought in 2007, in a different building.

Then the joint venture disappears from the record. On 13 and 14 March 2018 two companies were incorporated at Companies House — BL Whiteley Limited and BL Whiteley Retail Limited, both still active. The person with significant control of each is BL High Street and Shopping Centres Holding Company Limited of 20 Triton Street, London — British Land's own registered office — holding "75% or more" of shares and voting rights and the right to appoint and remove directors. No USS entity appears anywhere in that chain, and nobody has ever announced USS leaving. British Land's Final Results of 17 May 2023 mention Whiteley once, in a list of lettings, and not USS; its half-year results of 19 November 2025 mention neither.

Everything current names British Land alone — its own portfolio page and case study, both letting agents, the operator site's copyright line, and the Portsmouth News, which called it "Whiteley Shopping Centre owner British Land" in April and again in May 2026. So we record the owner as British Land, while being clear that the moment USS left, if it left, has never been published, and that the finest figure on the record is a Companies House band reading "75% or more". We are not writing 100%.