Next has announced the date it will officially open its new outlet store at a Swansea retail park. Last month, we reported how the popular fashion brand planned to open a new store selling clearance items including womenswear, menswear, childrenswear, home and branded clothing at Fforestfach Retail Park.
It has been revealed the store will create around 28 new permanent jobs, with plans to take on additional temporary staff, and will take occupancy in the unit left empty after the closure of River Island. And it has also been officially announced that the store will open on April 17. It will operate between 9am and 8pm from Monday to Friday, 9am until 7pm on Saturdays and 10am until 4pm on Sundays.
The new store's opening follows the closure of Next in Oxford Street, Swansea city centre. That unit has now been replaced by Shoe Zone, which itself relocated from Union Street. You can take a look inside the new Shoe Zone store by clicking here. Get Swansea stories straight to your inbox with our newsletter.
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The new addition will come as a welcome one for the retail park, which currently has six empty units, There will soon be a seventh, as the retail park is set to lose yet another store in Homesense, which has announced it is quitting Swansea and relocating to Llanelli instead. The homewares store will be closing its doors for good at the retail park at the end of March and directly transferring to Trostre Retail Park. You can read more about that by clicking here.
Supermarket chain Aldi will also soon open its fifth store at the retail park in the old New Look unit, right next door to Tesco Extra. The German budget supermarket already has branches at Parc Tawe, Cwmdu, Gorseinon and Llansamlet. In June last year, Swansea Council granted planning permission to an applicant known only as the 'UK Warehouse Retail Fund' to reconfigure unit 12 and 13, to create a much larger base.
Building work has also begun to create a new McDonald's drive-thru restaurant, which will have a 95-seat ground floor restaurant, outdoor seating area, and employ 65 people. You can read more about that by clicking here.
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