Marks & Spencer Sheffield: New food hall coming to South Yorkshire this autumn as more openings confirmed
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The 12,000 sq ft store in Barnsley is scheduled to open in autumn 2023 in the Peel Barnsley Retail Park on Harborough Hill Road. It is one of 20 new shop openings which were announced by Marks & Spencer on Monday, consisting of eight ‘full-line’ stores selling clothes, home and beauty products alongside groceries, and 12 food halls. It says the £480 million investment in new stores will create 3,400 new jobs.
But Marks & Spencer is still pushing ahead with plans to reduce its total number of larger shops from 247 to 180 by early 2026, which sparked concerns when it was announced last year about the future of its shops on Fargate in Sheffield city centre and at Meadowhall. It is also rolling out click-and-collect to 130 stores across the UK.
Asked whether it remains committed to its existing stores in Sheffield, a spokesperson for M&S said: “The announcement yesterday was about our national store investment plans, so we don’t have anything to update on in Sheffield specifically.”
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Hide AdNone of the 20 new shops announced on Monday are in Sheffield but there are plans for new ‘destination’ stores, designed with wider aisles with families in mind, in Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, all of which are shop relocations to former Debenhams sites. The old Debenhams at the top of The Moor in Sheffield city centre is still empty, though The Star recently reported how the owner hopes to exchange contracts soon with a buyer who wants to reopen it as a shop with ‘loads of concessions inside’.
Chief executive Stuart Machin told how stores were a ‘key part’ of the company’s future, alongside online trading. He said: “Our store rotation programme is about making sure we have the right stores, in the right place, with the right space and we’re aiming to rotate from the 247 stores we have today to 180 higher-quality, higher-productivity full-line stores that sell our full clothing, home and food offer whilst also opening over 100 bigger, better food sites. The out-performance of our recently relocated and renewed stores give us the confidence to go faster in our plan.”
The announcement of the new stores came after M&S revealed a 6.3 per cent rise in like-for-like sales across its food halls in the 13 weeks to December 31, with clothing and home comparable store sales up by 8.6 per cent over the same period.