The growing list of new stores for the Anglia Retail Park on Bury Road has expanded further with B&M starting to fit out the former Comet store on the site.
The Merseyside-based company signed up for the unit a few days ago and has already started work to fit it out. It hopes to open to the public in June although an exact date has still to be agreed.
Meanwhile work to prepare other new stores and the Bounce Trampoline Centre is continuing as the retail park prepares for a major summer relaunch.
Go Outdoors has had a new entrance installed and has workers busily preparing for its opening – it will be the first branch in the town.
The Range is preparing to open its new store on the park on June 2 – the existing store on the Suffolk Retail Park will eventually be converted into a Range “Outlet” store selling heavily-discounted items.
Signs announcing the arrival of B&M have gone up over recent days with the store scheduled to open in June.
A spokeswoman for B&M said: “We’ve only just taken over the unit, but we are looking for it to open on June 23.”
There were no details yet about how many new jobs would be created with the new store’s opening.
The latest branch follows on from B&M’s new town centre store which opened in Carr Street in November. It also has stores at Copdock Mill retail park and at Ransome’s Europark.
It has courted controversy in the past by selling a wide range of “non-bulky” goods on retail parks rather than in the town centre – but its decision to take over the former 99p store in Carr Street helped persuade planners that the company was not damaging the town centre.
The new units should make the Anglia Retail Park one of the busiest on the edge of town – leaving just a handful of empty units which could be occupied by the end of the year.
The rebirth of the park follows what looked like a devastating blow when the huge B&Q site closed last August.
However this turned out to have sparked its owners into a search for more tenants – and the location of the park just across Bury Road from the town’s largest Asda Superstore could see this part of Ipswich become a major out-of-town shopping destination.
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