Trinity Walk, Wakefield
Working in a joint venture with AREA Property Partners and Shepherd Construction, Sovereign Land has developed Trinity Walk – a new 500,000 sq ft shopping centre in Wakefield city centre. The scheme opened in May 2011 and had already proved an overwhelming success with both retailers and shoppers.
Trinity Walk – which is one of only three major shopping centres that will open this year (2011) – is transforming regional retail landscape. It includes Debenhams, with Wakefield’s first modern department store, and the city’s first Next. Other tenants include Sainsbury's, Asda Living and Argos as well as a host of fashion and accessories retailers such as H&M, New Look, River Island, Republic, Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Peacocks, JD, Bank, Deichmann, catering operators like Pizza Express, Costa and Esquires and many other top brands
The scheme comprises more than 50 shops, five new restaurants, a new indoor market, a 1,000-space car park and direct links with the new bus station.
Its success reflects a unique combination of key strengths including:
- an unusually large site (28 acres) in a city centre location but with direct access off Wakefield’s new inner city ring road;
- a design which provides large, simply-configured stores that modern retailers want but which were previously unavailable in the city centre;
- parking for almost 1,000 shopper vehicles;
- proximity to Wakefield’s new market hall and bus station (which were built as a first phase of the scheme);
- the opportunity to transform the under-shopped city into a new sub-regional shopping destination, stemming the leakage of shoppers from the core catchment to other retail locations in the region.
The opening of Trinity Walk brings Wakefield up in the CACI's National Retail Footprint Rankings to a top 60 city in the UK.
