The Trafford Centre has been valued at £1.057bn as at 31 December 2025, up £56.8m from £985.9m the year before. As Place North West reported, footfall rose to 23.5 million visits in 2025 from 22.8 million, and net rental income climbed £4m.
Who owns it
The centre is held by Trafford Centre Limited, a subsidiary of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which took control in 2020 after the collapse of Intu. Before Intu, it was Peel’s, and its sale was one of the largest single property transactions in British retail history.
So the pattern is familiar and worth naming: one of the North West’s most valuable assets is owned by a Canadian public pension fund, and the returns fund the retirements of Canadian workers. That is not a scandal. Institutional capital of that scale is exactly what an asset like this needs, and CPPIB has clearly invested rather than harvested. It is simply a fact about who captures the value created in Greater Manchester.
Why the numbers went up
Not by accident. The letting list reads as a deliberate strategy: the world’s largest JD Sports, plus Whittard, Joe & the Juice, Popmart and Pureseoul. Existing tenants including Apple, Mamas and Papas, Moss Bros and Swarovski took more space. Uniqlo, Footasylum, The White Company and Lululemon are due in 2026.
The common thread is that these are brands people travel for. A regional centre only works if it offers something the local high street cannot, and the ones that have struggled are those that carried the same mid-market chains as everywhere else.
The bit not to skip
The accounts also record £237m of current liabilities and a reliance on parent company financing, with £430m of mezzanine financing secured through to December 2027. Management expects the business environment “will remain uncertain given ongoing geopolitical events”.
That is a large centre carrying substantial debt with a refinancing point about 16 months away. The rising valuation and the growing income make that considerably easier to handle than it would have been in 2020, but it is the number to watch rather than the headline £1bn.
What it says about Northern retail
Set this against the wider picture and it is genuinely useful evidence. Retail has not collapsed. It has concentrated. The strongest destinations are taking share, adding footfall and pushing rents, while weaker centres continue to hollow out.
That is the same pattern we noted in Newcastle’s office market, where occupiers are consolidating into fewer, better buildings rather than taking less space overall. In retail as in offices, the flight to quality is the defining dynamic, and a town centre competing on being adequate is competing on the one thing that no longer wins.
The North is FU7URE’s briefing on the people, capital and infrastructure reshaping the North of England. Subscribe to the free newsletter to get it in your inbox.
Leave a Reply