Bracknell Town Centre

The Lexicon opened in September 2017 in Bracknell town centre, Berkshire, as a comprehensive retail-led regeneration of the former Bracknell Town Centre, with approximately 48,000 sqm of retail and leisure floor space connecting new retail streets to the Market Place square and the existing Princess Square precinct. The development is owned by Schroders and Legal & General as the culmination of a 20-year regeneration programme for one of the UK’s post-war new towns.

Bracknell was designated as a new town in 1949 and developed through the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate London’s post-war overspill population. By the 1990s, the original town centre precinct had become functionally obsolete, a widely cited example of post-war retail architecture that failed to retain consumer spending against out-of-town competitors and the growing connectivity of the M3/M4 corridor towns. The 20-year planning and redevelopment process that produced The Lexicon created a new retail and leisure street circuit centred on the Market Place square, introducing Fenwick as the anchor department store alongside Primark, H&M, and mainstream fashion and lifestyle operators. Bracknell’s position in the Thames Valley technology corridor, with the headquarters of Honda UK, Dell, and Waitrose among other major employers, provides a professional workforce catchment with Thames Valley disposable income levels.

Bracknell’s population of approximately 80,000 provides the immediate base. The Thames Valley catchment from Wokingham, Camberley, and Reading extends the regional draw. South Western Railway services connect Bracknell to London Waterloo in approximately 55 minutes.

The Schroders and Legal & General joint venture manages The Lexicon as the culmination of a generational regeneration investment. The Fenwick anchor is the commercial signal of that investment’s ambition: an independent department store commitment to a new-town retail centre in 2017 is a deliberate counter-programming choice whose commercial performance defines the long-term success of the Lexicon regeneration model.