Regional overview

Our regional portfolio includes 17 shopping and leisure parks and three shopping centres; Leicester's Fosse Shopping Park, Oxford’s Westgate Centre, Exeter’s Princesshay and Worcester’s CrownGate Centre. We are the UK’s fourth largest owner of directly owned shopping parks.

Our investments are principally in the retail warehouse sector, an area where we are specialist asset managers, and the leisure and shopping centre sectors. Our schemes are generally in regionally dominant locations where we believe the long-term supply and demand dynamics are most favourable, and where we retain a competitive advantage as specialist property investors.

We continue to invest. In 2014, we completed the largest single asset acquisition in the history of The Crown Estate, the £345.5 million purchase of Fosse Shopping Park in Leicester through a 50/50 joint venture with Gingko Tree Investment Ltd. Fosse Park attracts over eight million shoppers a year and at 560,000 ft² it is not only one of the largest parks in the UK but also attracts the highest rents.

This deal established us as the fourth largest direct owner of regional retail parks in the UK, following on from the acquisition of Silverlink Shopping Park, on the outskirts of Newcastle and a prime retail park in the north east, for £131 million, and Coliseum shopping park in Cheshire for £81 million.

As part of our focus on increasing our portfolio of prime retail and leisure schemes, we are also funding the development of the £80 million Banbury Gateway fashion park in Oxfordshire. This new park will have 285,000 ft² of prime retail, restaurant and leisure space. Work on the scheme commenced in 2014.

While our regional investments are predominantly in the retail and leisure sectors, a smaller exposure to office and industrial properties also plays a role in helping us deliver on our financial objectives. Within these holdings we own offices in Birmingham and Cambridge plus a number of industrial estates.