Rushmere shopping Centre & Retail Park

Rushmere Shopping Centre opened in Craigavon, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, with approximately 50,000 sqm of gross leasable area as the principal enclosed retail destination for the Craigavon urban area and the wider south County Armagh and north County Down catchment. The centre anchors the Rushmere commercial district in Portadown, which has grown into the largest retail cluster in the Craigavon borough.

Craigavon was developed in the 1960s as Northern Ireland’s largest planned new town, linking the historic towns of Portadown and Lurgan with a new city-centre development in the area between them. Rushmere Shopping Centre sits at the commercial heart of the Portadown section of this corridor, serving a catchment defined by the relative isolation of the area from Belfast (approximately 40 kilometres north on the M1) and from Newry (approximately 35 kilometres south on the A28). The centre provides Primark, H&M, Next, Marks & Spencer, and mainstream fashion and lifestyle retail to a catchment that spans the rural and small-town communities of south County Armagh, north County Down, and County Tyrone beyond the nearest alternative major retail centre. Rushmere Retail Park adjacent provides complementary big-box retail capacity for the same regional catchment.

Craigavon’s population of approximately 90,000 in the immediate urban area is supplemented by the rural County Armagh and south County Down catchment of approximately 200,000. The M1 motorway provides connectivity northward to Belfast and southward toward Newry and the Dublin corridor.

Rushmere serves as the commercial anchor of a planned new town whose population has grown substantially from its 1960s design base, creating a retail demand that the original new-town commercial provision was not scaled to meet, a gap that the successive expansions of the Rushmere complex have partially addressed within the constraints of the Portadown commercial zone.