Peacocks at Northwich Retail Park closes doors for last time

Peacocks in Northwich Retail Park has been trading in the town for 16 years, but loyal customers will now have to travel to either the chain’s Crewe or Macclesfield stores to do their clothes shopping. In a post on social media, a member of the Peacocks Northwich team said they ‘hope to reopen in the future’, but it’s not known whether the business has plans to move to another site in the town. A spokesman for the store said on social media: “Unfortunately, we are closing our doors on Wednesday, April 5.

“Your nearest branches after our closure are Crewe and Macclesfield. “From all our team in Northwich, we would like to thank the customers who have supported us over the last 16 years, and we hope to reopen in the future. “This is goodbye for now.”

The closure comes after Cheshire West and Chester Council granted planning permission to convert four units at the Manchester Road site into one much larger unit. Peacocks and Carpet Right were the only two businesses trading in the affected units when the planning permission was granted in November 2022, but the other two had previously been home to Sports Direct and Argos. The planning application, submitted by Prudential Assurance Company Limited, said the merged units would be taken over by ‘a discount variety retailer’.

A separate planning application has also been submitted to extend the permitted retail use to include the sale of food and drink on a 400sqm part of the site. 

The application said: “The proposed variation will help to meet the retail needs of residents locally and reduce the potential for shoppers and expenditure to leak out to competing centres.

“This accords with the principles of achieving more sustainable forms of development within both local and national planning policy.”