Earlier this week M&S announced it would be closing its Colchester High Street store and moving to Stane Park.

Marks and Spencer, located in High Street, Colchester, will shut later this year as part of expansion plans which will see a bigger store open.

It is part of Churchmanor Estates’s 173,000 sq ft Stane Retail Park development in Stanway.

The retail park, about the size of three football pitches, is already home to B&Q, Cook and Aldi which have opened in the last few months.

Bakery chain Greggs is also expected to open a new branch at the retail park.

Last year it was announced Colchester’s first M&S Foodhall would open in “early 2022” as the third flagship store for the retail development.

But this has now been delayed to later in 2022 amid changes to the store. 

The new store will now be expanded to include clothing and homeware departments.

It will also have an M&S café.

The brand says its new store will be larger than the existing shop in the High Street and will stock a bigger range of products.

Gazette:

The £70m Stane Retail Park will be fully completed this month, when M&S will then begin work on their new store which will open later this autumn.

As part of the relocation, the existing M&S Colchester store will close later this year, but will remain open as normal until the new store is ready.

There will be opportunities for all colleagues working in the current store to work in the new Stane Retail Park store or other local M&S stores.

There will also be additional new job opportunities created for local workers when the store opens.

Andrew Icke, Regional Manager for M&S, said: “Shopping habits are changing, so we’re rotating our store estate to make sure we have the right stores to offer our customers a brilliant shopping experience.

Gazette:

"We appreciate the current store closure may be disappointing news for some, but we believe this is the right decision to invest in a new store for the local area so we can deliver the very best of M&S for customers in Colchester.”

Matt Cloke, Development Director at Churchmanor Estates, said: “Stane Retail Park is the only major retail park in the country to be built and funded through the Covid pandemic period and we are pleased that the risk we took to build the scheme speculatively has been endorsed by M&S with their decision to invest in a new, larger M&S store for Colchester on our site.”