In the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, a retail park is a grouping of many retail

Retailing

Retail consists of the sale of physical goods or merchandise from a fixed location, such as a department store, boutique or kiosk, or by mail, in small or individual lots for direct consumption by the purchaser. Retailing may include subordinated services, such as delivery. Purchasers may be...

 warehouses

Warehouse store

A warehouse store, as opposed to a warehouse club, is a retail location with a limited variety of merchandise sold in bulk at a discount to customers...

 and superstores with associated car parking. Its North American equivalent is a power centre. Retail parks are found on the fringes of most large town

Town

A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while...

s and cities in highly accessible locations and are aimed at households owning a car. They offer an alternative to busy city centres. Such developments have been encouraged by cheaper more affordable land on the outskirts of towns and cities, and with loose planning controls in a number of Enterprise Zones, making planning and development very easy. However, in more recent years, in many areas across the UK, planning controls have been tightened up in order to preserve the countryside. This has made it harder for such developments to go ahead, resulting in many smaller, more compact retail parks, sometimes only consisting of about three or four stores being built on former brownfield sites. There are also environmental disadvantages to large retail parks on the rural fringe, including the increased traffic and pollution that occurs in getting there.

Typically they host a range of chain stores, including supermarkets, clothes or footwear superstores, electrical stores, carpet and others. Owing to their out-of-town sites, abundance of free parking and proximity to major roads, retail parks are often easier to reach than central shopping areas, and as a result often take away trade from city centre retailers.

See also

• In North America, a strip mall
  Strip mall
  A strip mall is an open-area shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front...
  
   is a small grouping of retail stores that share parking but have separate entrances, and a power centre is a complex of several big-box stores and strip malls, similar to the retail park.