Start at the Cross. Look down Bridge Street, then turn and look up Eastgate. If you have lived in Chester for any length of time you can play a game: count the units that were something five years ago and are nothing now. Browns. BHS. Wilko. The B&M in the Forum. Half of the Grosvenor Centre as it used to be. The strip facing Chester Cathedral that has been quietly emptying for longer than anyone wants to admit.

It is not, technically, half. The best recent local figure, from the Cheshire West and Chester Retail Study 2025, puts Chester at 138 vacant outlets: 19.0 per cent of all units, with 23.4 per cent of total floorspace empty. Strip out the units around the former Forum and old market that are being held for the Northgate redevelopment, and the figure falls to 120 vacant outlets, or 16.9 per cent.1 Newmark, ranking the same year, put Chester eighth out of 1,000 UK retail centres for vitality, the highest-placed shopping destination in the north of England, ahead of York.1

So in the strict accounting sense, the headline is a lie. Chester is not half empty. It is closer to a fifth.

That is also still enough to be noticed.

What is true is that the empty units are not evenly distributed. They cluster on the stretches that used to be the busiest. The half of Chester that is empty is the half that mattered most, which is why locals talk about it the way they do, and why visitors arrive expecting Tudor splendour and end up photographing a vacant Burger King.

To understand how this happened, you have to start with a name that has been quietly removed from the front of one of the city’s biggest buildings.

Illustrated empty Chester shopfronts
The vacancy story feels bigger because the empty units sit on the streets everyone still uses as Chester's stage.

The Grosvenor Question

Until November 2025, the largest shopping centre in Chester was called the Grosvenor. As of that month, it is called Eastgate Square.2 The rebrand was sold as a “transformative makeover”: new seating, timber cladding, a large digital screen. On the surface it is exactly that. Underneath, it is a quiet tidying-up of a much older story.

The Grosvenor family have been in this part of Cheshire since the 1400s. The Eaton Estate, the family’s rural seat just south of the city, still manages more than 500 residential and commercial properties across rural Cheshire and parts of Chester city centre.3 In 1965, drawing on Canadian experience, Grosvenor opened one of the first covered shopping centres in the United Kingdom on Eastgate Street and put the family name on it.4

For a generation it was the modern face of Chester’s retail offer. By the 1990s, it was already being eased out of the family’s direct control: in 1996, Grosvenor granted a 150-year head lease on the centre and stepped back from running it.5

The centre changed hands quietly after that. In 2015, HIG Chester Property Sarl bought the head lease from Carlyle Properties and Bride Hall Estates for around £65 million. By 2020 it was in receivership.5 In 2022, Grosvenor sold the freehold to the Martin Property Group, an Irish family-owned investor that has done a number of these jobs across the UK and Ireland.5

The statement Grosvenor put out at the time was, by their standards, unusually direct:

“With the continued challenges facing the high street… we believe that selling the freehold of the site to the Martin Property Group provides the best opportunity to develop its offering and enhance the retail and leisure experience in the heart of the city.”

Translated: this was not working, and it had not been our problem for a quarter of a century anyway.

This matters, because the version of the story you hear most often in Chester goes something like: the Duke owns the shops, the Duke charges too much, the Duke does not care. It is a satisfying narrative. It has the merit of being short. It is also, on the available evidence, not really true.

The Grosvenor name came off the centre after years in which Grosvenor had not owned or managed the shopping-centre business, almost three decades, in fact. The “Duke won’t lower rents” line is repeated often enough locally to feel established, but we could not find an on-record source for it. It is not strong enough to carry the argument.

What is true is more interesting, and slightly less satisfying.

What Grosvenor Actually Does In Chester

The 7th Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, is the 14th richest person in the United Kingdom according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List, with a fortune valued at £9.88 billion.6 He inherited the title in 2016 at the age of twenty-five. The wealth is held in trust, with the Duke as beneficial owner and chair of trustees rather than as legal owner, an arrangement that has attracted its own headlines, mostly about inheritance tax.

He was married at Chester Cathedral in 2024. His daughter, Lady Cosima Grosvenor, was born in 2025. By all accounts he is more comfortable on the estate than in the property pages, which is not a luxury most landlords get.

Grosvenor’s flagship UK retail asset is Liverpool ONE, not Chester. The Eaton Estate’s role here is much more parochial: managing residential and commercial property in Aldford, Eccleston, Saighton, parts of Churton and Waverton, and what the company describes as “Chester’s city centre and Handbridge.”3

In the 2023 annual report, the Estate’s asset values fell slightly, and Grosvenor’s stated reason was telling: “a property sale and the conversion of several Chester City Centre market-let properties to affordable housing.”7

That is to say: where Grosvenor still has skin in the city centre, the direction of travel is partly out of retail entirely, into homes. Their social housing arm, Grosvenor Hart Homes, is now a registered provider running 29 homes and a community facility in central Chester in partnership with the council, with a stated target of 750 homes over ten years.8

In 2024 they teamed up with iKO Projects to open the Rooftop Social Club above a multi-storey car park, the first rooftop bar the city has had, a perfectly nice addition that sits awkwardly with the “Grosvenor are killing the high street” reading.

Rooftop Social Club in Chester
Rooftop Social Club is one of the cleaner examples of Chester finding new uses for awkward central space.

Rooftop Social Club — One of the more visible examples of Chester trying to reuse awkward city-centre space rather than wait for traditional retail to come back.

None of which makes the Eaton Estate above scrutiny. Long-leasehold landlords with deep pockets and centuries-long horizons do not need to fill units in a hurry, which has its own consequences for streets that need life now. But the more you look, the more it becomes clear that Grosvenor is not the protagonist of Chester’s empty-shops story. They are part of the backdrop. The actual drivers are bigger and more boring than a duke.

What Actually Happened, In Three Closures

Strip out everything else and Chester’s vacancy crisis is largely the story of three buildings emptying inside five years.

BHS, 2016. The national chain went into administration in April. The Chester store followed by August. A unit of that size, in that location, does not refill in a hurry, and did not.9

Browns of Chester, 2021. The Grade I listed building on Eastgate Street had been a department store since the eighteenth century, latterly trading as Debenhams. When Boohoo bought the Debenhams brand in 2020 and closed all the stores, Chester lost its largest single retail unit on its most visible street.10 It was put up for sale and bought by Martin Property Group, the same firm that took the Grosvenor freehold, for an undisclosed sum.

Wilko, October 2023. A national collapse of the kind that happens roughly twice a decade now. The Foregate Street store was one of the last to close. The manager Rebecca Bradbury said in her farewell post: “I’m sorry we won’t be a part of the high street any longer.”11 Poundland moved in two months later, relocating from Frodsham Street, which is the kind of high-street churn that on paper looks like a wash and in practice means another empty unit somewhere else.

This is what national retail collapse looks like in a single city. Add B&M, which left the old Forum at Christmas 2023 when the Forum itself wound down. Add Revolution, The Second Floor, Chatwins and Boheme, all gone in 2024, and North Light in early 2025.12 Add Matalan on Stadium Way, gone January 2025 when the landlord wanted the site for redevelopment.13 None of these closures is unique to Chester. All of them happen to land in the same square mile.

There is a softer version of the same story in Chester’s lost restaurants: places close, the facts thin out, and the memory gets louder every year.

The wider numbers are worth holding in your head. Centre for Retail Research counted 13,479 high-street store closures in the UK in 2024, about thirty-seven a day, and 169,395 retail jobs lost.14 National vacancy rates sat around 17.6 per cent on high streets and 14 per cent in shopping centres through 2024, according to Savills.15 Online retail accounted for roughly 28 per cent of total UK retail by early 2026, having peaked above 37 per cent during the pandemic and then settled at a level that no one in 2019 thought was permanent and which now plainly is.16

When locals say “everything is closing,” they are right and also slightly wrong. Things are closing everywhere. Chester is just unusually photogenic about it.

The Cheshire Oaks Problem

Drive nine miles north from the Cross, take Junction 10 off the M53, and you arrive at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet. It opened in March 1995, the first designer outlet village in Europe.17 It is the largest in the United Kingdom, with around 400,000 sq ft of retail space and more than 150 boutiques, restaurants and cafes.18

Burberry, Polo Ralph Lauren, Mulberry, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Nike, Adidas, Marks & Spencer. Most of the brands a mid-market shopper might be willing to drive for, with the exception of John Lewis, are at Cheshire Oaks. The car park is free. The retail proposition is open-air, pedestrianised, and built around exactly the kind of “everything in one place, stop for lunch, leave with bags” model that high streets used to do and now mostly do not.

To our knowledge, no one has published a study quantifying how much retail spend Cheshire Oaks pulls out of Chester city centre. It is one of those local facts that everybody assumes and nobody has properly measured. What is documented is the scale: eight million visitors a year, twenty-nine years of operation, expanding rather than contracting. Whatever number you pick, it is not zero. A city centre nine miles from Europe’s first designer outlet was never going to win the mid-market clothing fight. Chester has been quietly losing it since John Major was prime minister.

The Council’s Bet

The other big story of the last decade, running in parallel to the empty-units story, is Northgate. Whether you think it is a triumph or a slow-motion compromise depends largely on which bit of it you stand in.

Chester Market
The market is the obvious counterargument to the idea that Chester cannot make new city-centre space work.

In May 2020, with the city already shut, Cheshire West and Chester Council voted to fund Phase One of the Northgate scheme directly: £75 million, repaid over twenty-five years, on the basis that the private sector was not going to do it.19 Phase One opened in stages between late 2022 and 2023. It comprises the new Chester Market, relocated from the old Forum, a six-screen Picturehouse cinema, an 800-space car park, restaurants, a co-working space, and Exchange Square, the public square the city has been needing for about forty years.

Chester Market has been a success by any reasonable measure. One million visitors in its first six months. Five million within two years. By November 2025, three years in, it had passed seven million.20 It has also won a clutch of awards, been featured in National Geographic, and turned a handful of food traders into stable small businesses with growing teams.

Chester Market — The strongest recent proof that Chester can still make a new city-centre idea work when the offer is clear enough.

The councillor Nathan Pardoe described the market as a “huge success” and the next phase as “a once in a generation opportunity to reimagine buildings in a space that is hard to navigate.”21 He is not wrong on either count.

Phase Two is where the timeline gets harder to be enthusiastic about. The pre-development agreement for the next stage, covering Hamilton House, Merchant House, Goldsmith House, the former Forum and the former Gateway Theatre, was signed in November 2025 with VINCI UK Developments and ION Property Developments.22

The plan is for 400-plus new homes and a remade quarter of the city centre. The published programme - public consultation in 2026, planning in 2027, demolition in 2028, construction starting 2029 - is the kind of timeline that comes with the usual caveats about large public-private regeneration schemes, which is to say that none of those dates is guaranteed.23

That is a useful timeline to file away. The buildings that the average visitor finds most depressing, the empty Forum, the boarded shopfronts on the way through to Hunter Street, are not going to look meaningfully different until the early 2030s. Whether you find that reassuring or grim depends on how patient you are. We are mostly grim about it, but we accept the explanation.

Where Chester Is Actually Winning

If you read only the first half of this piece you would think Chester was in trouble. Stand on Watergate Street on a Friday evening, or in Hoole on a Saturday morning, and you would think the opposite. Both things are true at once.

The food and drink scene is the obvious recovery story. Sticky Walnut in Hoole, the original outpost of Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros group, is still the gold standard for a Tuesday-night-treat dinner that does not require booking three weeks out. Chef’s Table has been doing seasonal, mostly-local cooking since 2014 and moved to larger premises on Pepper Street in 2023, which remains one of the city centre’s quieter food success stories.

Covino, the small wine-led restaurant that opened on Rufus Court in late 2016 and outgrew the original site within two years, has spent the time since on Northgate Street quietly proving that a small room with a good list and a short menu is a perfectly viable Chester business model.24 Porta, the tapas bar tucked behind the town hall, expanded into the former Joseph Benjamin space in 2021. The Wright brothers closing the original after fifteen years to put their attention on the smaller, busier room next door is the kind of decision that looks like a loss in the closure column and is in fact something else.

That Beer Place on Foregate Street was named the CAMRA National Cider and Perry Pub of the Year for 2024, a real award, not the kind you can buy.25 The owner Lisa Lord said at the time that the goal had always been “to make Chester a destination for cider and perry celebration in the UK,” which sounds like something a bidding document would say if a bidding document were ever this specific. They run up to 140 ciders and perries on rotation.

Salt House Tapas moved into the former Boheme unit on Bridge Street in late 2024 and was busy from week one.26 Maray, the Liverpool-founded Middle Eastern small-plates restaurant, was announced for Northgate in 2025 and is now open.27 Cafe Barbette is due to arrive in Exchange Square in 2026.28 The Rooftop Social Club has, against expectations, made it through a winter.

The city is not losing brands at any greater rate than it is gaining them. It just feels otherwise, because the losses sit in places everyone walks past.

Hoole is the neighbourhood story. A 400-metre stretch of Faulkner Street and Charles Street now contains around forty independent shops, which is more than several actual towns manage.29 When Boots closed the Faulkner Street branch in January 2024, the unit was filled by COOK fourteen months later. That is an unusually fast turnaround for a unit that size, and a small but useful indicator of where in greater Chester demand actually exists.

There are other quietly encouraging signs in the centre. The former Browns building, 150,000 square feet, Grade I listed, vacant since Debenhams closed in 2021, is now partly occupied by H Beauty, the Harrods spinoff, which opened in February 2026.30 It is the kind of tenant Chester badly needed: not another small churn shop, but a national name taking on one of the city’s most awkward prestige buildings.

The Rows in Chester
The Rows are part asset, part puzzle: distinctive enough to draw people in, awkward enough to make every fix complicated.

Mountain Warehouse came back to Foregate Street. Brook Taverner has opened on the Rows. Oliver Brown, the menswear label, picked Chester for its first store outside London. Sostrene Grene, Rudy’s Pizza31 and The Ivy32 are all confirmed for the city centre.

the Rows — The Rows are part of Chester's appeal and part of its problem: beautiful, complicated, and difficult to regenerate neatly.

The Honest Verdict

So why does it feel like half the shops are empty when the official count is closer to a fifth?

Because the empty half is the visible half. Eastgate Street and the upper end of Bridge Street are the architectural set-pieces of the whole city. They are what tourists photograph, what the Eastgate Clock looks down on, what every postcard frames. When a unit on Eastgate Street goes dark, ten thousand people a day notice. When a unit in Hoole fills, eight hundred do. The ratio of attention to reality is wildly skewed, and Chester suffers for it more than most cities of its size precisely because it is so much prettier than most cities of its size.

The Duke of Westminster did not cause this. The actual causes are the ones every English city centre is dealing with.

The Grosvenor name came off the shopping centre last year because the Grosvenor name had not run that shopping centre since 1996, and there was no longer any reason to keep up the pretence. The actual causes are the ones every English city centre is dealing with: three big national chains gone in five years, a shopping outlet nine miles away that takes the mid-market spend, business-rates relief for retail, hospitality and leisure cut from 75 per cent in 2024-25 to 40 per cent in 2025-26,33 and an online retail share that is not coming back below a quarter of total UK spend in any timeframe that helps a 1965 shopping centre.

What Chester also has, which most comparable cities do not, is a genuinely good market, a genuinely good food and drink scene, a council that has put £75 million of its own money on the table for the slowest possible long-term bet, and a built environment that, even with the empty units, is one of the most distinctive in the country.

The empty stretches will not look better any time soon. Phase Two of Northgate is the better part of a decade away. Eastgate Square is a paint-job. The Rows still have ownership structures so complicated that some of the upstairs and downstairs of the same building have different landlords, which makes coordinated regeneration difficult to the point of comedy.

But it is not a city in collapse. It is a city in an awkward decade, with the awkward parts mostly visible from the postcards. We would not write off a place that has That Beer Place, Sticky Walnut, a seven-million-visit market and a working rooftop bar. We would, on a Saturday morning in May, recommend you walk down Eastgate Street, look at what is empty, walk down Watergate, look at what is full, and make up your own mind.

The half of Chester that is empty is the half that mattered most. The other half is doing fine.

See Also

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Newmark, “Retail Vitality Rankings 2024,” 2024. Chester city centre is listed in the top 10 UK retail destinations and Newmark explains that the ranking uses indicators including market size, retail offer, vacancy, spend and footfall. Also see Lambert Smith Hampton for Cheshire West and Chester Council, “Cheshire West and Chester Retail Study, Volume 4: Health Check Assessments,” 2025, which records 138 vacant outlets in Chester, equal to 19.0% of outlets, and 23.4% of floorspace vacant. ↩ ↩2

  2. Chester BID, “Grosvenor Shopping Centre becomes Eastgate Square,” November 2025. The rebrand and refurbishment details include new seating, lighting, planting, signage, timber cladding and a digital screen. ↩

  3. Grosvenor, “Eaton Estate” and “Find a property.” Grosvenor describes the Eaton Estate as the family seat since the 1400s and says it provides tenancy options for more than 500 residential and commercial properties across rural Cheshire and parts of Chester city centre and Handbridge. ↩ ↩2

  4. Grosvenor, “Our history.” Grosvenor states that it completed one of the UK’s first covered shopping centres in Chester city centre in 1965. ↩

  5. Place North West, “Chester’s Grosvenor Shopping Centre sold,” 31 August 2022; Insider Media, “Chester shopping centre freehold acquired by family group,” 31 August 2022. These report Martin Property Group’s acquisition of the freehold from Grosvenor’s Eaton Estate and explain that Grosvenor had granted a 150-year head lease in 1996. Related local coverage also records the HIG Chester Property Sarl head lease and earlier ownership history. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. The Sunday Times Rich List 2025, “The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family net worth,” 16 May 2025. The list values Hugh Grosvenor and the Grosvenor family at £9.884bn and ranks them 14th. For the trust/inheritance-tax background, see The Guardian, “Inheritance tax: why the new Duke of Westminster will not pay billions,” 11 August 2016, and Grosvenor, “The facts about our ownership.” ↩

  7. Grosvenor, “Annual Review 2023,” and related Grosvenor financial-performance statement, 2024. The annual-review material refers to the conversion of several Chester city-centre market-let properties to affordable housing. ↩

  8. Grosvenor Hart Homes, “Social enterprise”; Grosvenor, “Grosvenor Hart Homes launches £100m acquisition drive,” 18 November 2025. Grosvenor Hart Homes describes itself as a registered provider of social housing with a plan to provide more than 750 homes over ten years. Earlier Grosvenor material describes the initial Chester homes and community facility. ↩

  9. ITV News, “Final day of trading for remaining BHS stores,” 28 August 2016; The Chester Blog, “Top 5 empty premises in Chester: 2025 edition,” 16 April 2025. These support the national BHS closure and the local point that the former Chester BHS unit on Foregate Street has been empty since August 2016. ↩

  10. The Guardian, “Debenhams to close all stores with 12,000 jobs at risk as Boohoo buys brand,” 25 January 2021; ITV Granada, “End of an era as Debenhams closes its doors for the final time,” 14 May 2021. These cover Boohoo buying the Debenhams brand without taking on the stores and include Browns of Chester as part of the final Debenhams closure story. ↩

  11. The Chester Blog, “On the closure of Wilko,” 8 October 2023; Chester Standard, local coverage of Poundland opening in the former Wilko unit, December 2023. The Chester Blog records the Foregate Street Wilko closure and quotes local reaction. ↩

  12. The Chester Blog and The CAPP, 2024 year-in-review coverage of Chester closures. Use this for the local closure cluster, but phrase cautiously: Revolution, The Second Floor, Chatwins and Boheme closed in 2024; North Light closed in early 2025. ↩

  13. Chester Nub News, “Chester Matalan store confirms closure in the new year,” December 2024; Insider Media, “High street closures: 10 brands shutting down in January,” 23 January 2025. Both report that Matalan on Stadium Way closed on 4 January 2025 due to the landlord’s redevelopment plans. ↩

  14. Centre for Retail Research figures reported by Insight DIY, “CRR: 2024 Retail Job Losses And Store Closures,” 31 December 2024. The report gives 13,479 store closures and 169,395 retail jobs lost in 2024. ↩

  15. Savills, “Spotlight: Shopping Centre and High Street - Q3 2024,” 31 October 2024. Savills reports high-street voids at 17.6% and shopping-centre voids at 14.0%. ↩

  16. Office for National Statistics, “Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales,” Retail Sales Index time series J4MC; ONS, “Retail sales, Great Britain: February 2026.” The ONS reports online retail at 28.2% of total retail sales in February 2026, with the long-run series showing the pandemic peak. ↩

  17. McArthurGlen, “About us: Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet,” and McArthurGlen Group, “Who we are.” McArthurGlen says Cheshire Oaks opened in 1995 and was Europe’s first designer outlet. ↩

  18. McArthurGlen, “Cheshire Oaks’ 30th anniversary celebrates style,” 9 June 2025; McArthurGlen, “About us: Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet.” These sources describe Cheshire Oaks as the UK’s largest designer outlet, with around 400,000 sq ft of retail space and more than 150 boutiques, restaurants and cafes. ↩

  19. RivingtonHark, “Chester Northgate”; Cheshire West and Chester Council regeneration material. RivingtonHark lists Chester Northgate Phase One as a £75m project for Cheshire West and Chester Council. Council material describes Northgate as the largest Chester building project for more than 40 years, including the market, cinema, restaurants, offices, square, arcade and car park. ↩

  20. Chester Market, “Chester Market celebrates three years of success,” November 2025; Cheshire West and Chester Council, “Chester Market celebrates second birthday with new traders and a prize for its five millionth customer,” November 2024. These record five million visitors by the second birthday and more than seven million by the third anniversary. ↩

  21. Cheshire West and Chester Council, “Council signs Pre-Development Agreement for Chester Northgate Future Phases,” 27 November 2025. The council describes Chester Market as a success and quotes Cllr Nathan Pardoe on the next phase as a chance to reimagine a hard-to-navigate part of the city centre. ↩

  22. Cheshire West and Chester Council, “Council signs Pre-Development Agreement for Chester Northgate Future Phases,” 27 November 2025; Invest Chester, “Northgate Phase Two Details.” These confirm the pre-development agreement with VINCI UK Developments and the joint venture with ION Property Developments for the future phases. ↩

  23. The Chester Blog, “Northgate developers lay out vision before public engagement in 2026,” 27 November 2025; Place North West, “Agreements signed to unlock pair of Cheshire regen projects,” 28 November 2025. These give the published/projected programme for consultation, planning, demolition and later construction. Treat this as a projected timeline rather than a guaranteed delivery date. ↩

  24. Elite Bistros, “Sticky Walnut”; Chef’s Table, official website and contact page; The Chester Blog, “Covino on the rise,” 20 June 2019; Porta, “Our Story.” These support Sticky Walnut opening in Hoole in 2011, Chef’s Table reopening at larger Pepper Street premises in August 2023, Covino moving from Rufus Court to Northgate Street, and Porta expanding into the former Joseph Benjamin space in 2021. ↩

  25. CAMRA, “CAMRA announces the 2024 National Cider & Perry Pub of the Year,” 1 October 2024; CAMRA, “Beer Place takes top cider title.” CAMRA confirms That Beer Place in Chester won the 2024 national award and records that the pub offers up to 140 real ciders and perries. ↩

  26. Chester Nub News, “Salt House Tapas opens new restaurant in Chester,” 26 November 2024. This confirms Salt House Tapas opened on Bridge Street and took over the former Boheme site. ↩

  27. Maray, “Maray to Open in Chester This Winter,” 19 August 2025; Maray, “Chester” booking/location page. These support Maray signing for/opening its Chester site at Northgate Street, with the official page now describing it as open. ↩

  28. Cafe Barbette, official website; Code Hospitality, “Bar Manager, Cafe Barbette,” April 2026. These support Cafe Barbette as a forthcoming Exchange Square opening in Chester in 2026, rather than an already-open venue. ↩

  29. Move to Chester, Hoole neighbourhood profile; COOK, “Chester” shop page; The Chester Blog, “Cook coming to Hoole in March,” 2 January 2025. These support Hoole’s strong independent-shop offer and COOK opening at 4 Faulkner Street on 28 March 2025 in the former Boots unit. ↩

  30. Harrods, “H beauty Chester”; Chester BID, “H Beauty opens in Chester,” 12 February 2026; The Chester Blog, “On the opening of H Beauty,” 24 March 2026. These confirm that H Beauty has opened in Eastgate Square in the former Browns/Debenhams building. ↩

  31. Rudy’s Pizza, “Chester”; Retail & Leisure International, “Rudy’s Confirms Chester Opening,” 16 April 2026. These support Rudy’s confirmed Chester opening at 38 Bridge Street. ↩

  32. The Ivy Collection, “Introducing The Ivy Chester Brasserie”; Visit Cheshire, “Look inside Chester’s new dining destination as The Ivy officially opens its doors,” April 2026. These support The Ivy opening in Chester in spring 2026. ↩

  33. GOV.UK, “Business Rates Relief: 2025/26 Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Scheme,” 16 January 2025; Manchester City Council, “Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Business Rates Relief Scheme.” These support the change from 75% relief in 2024/25 to 40% relief in 2025/26, subject to the relevant cap. ↩