British Land : Next Home & Garden Opens at Meadowhall

British Land announces that Next has opened a new £10m store next to Meadowhall Shopping Centre in Sheffield.

The new 60,000 sq ft store at Vulcan Road is a Home and Garden store with the garden centre due to open in early 2015.

The new store allows Next to offer its full range of home products including homewares, DIY and garden provisions.

The Next store has created more than 60 new jobs and will sit alongside a Costa Drive Thru which opened in September. Vulcan Road is next to Meadowhall Shopping Centre which attracts more than 25 million customers a year. The overall Vulcan Road development has the potential to deliver 150 new jobs to the area, bringing much needed investment to Sheffield.

Paul Case, Development Manager for British Land, said: "The development at Vulcan Road is a great example of British Land investing in its assets and creating environments which meet our customers' needs.  We are delighted to further extend our relationship with Next, who now have almost 50 stores across our portfolio, and to bring one of their new format stores to Sheffield."

Rob Stewart, Manager of the Next store, added: "There is only one other Next Home & Garden in the UK, so we are very excited to bring this new style of store to Sheffield and are very pleased to be creating new jobs in the area."

Notes to Editors

About British Land
We are one of Europe's largest publicly listed real estate companies. We own, manage, develop and finance a portfolio of high quality commercial property, focused on retail locations around the UK and London Offices & Residential. We have total assets in the UK, owned or managed of £19.0 billion (British Land share of which is £12.8 billion), as valued at 30 September 2014. Our properties are home to over 1,000 different organisations and receive over 340 million visits each year. Our objective is to deliver long-term and sustainable total returns to our shareholders and we do this by focusing on Places People Prefer. People have a choice where they work, shop and live and we aim to create outstanding places which make a positive difference to people's everyday lives. Our customer orientation enables us to develop a deep understanding of the people who use our places. We employ a lean team of experts, who have the skills to translate this understanding into creating the right places, and we have an efficient capital structure which is able to effectively finance these places.

UK Retail assets account for 54% of our portfolio. As the UK's largest listed owner and manager of retail space, our portfolio is well matched to the different ways people shop today, from major regional shopping centres to single occupier locations. We are focused on being the destination of choice for retailers and their customers by being the best provider of spaces and services. Comprising around 25 million sq ft of retail space across retail parks, superstores, shopping centres, department stores and leisure assets, the retail portfolio is modern, flexible and adaptable to a wide range of formats.

Our Office and Residential portfolio, which accounts for 46% of our portfolio is focused on London.  We have an attractive mix of high quality buildings in well managed environments and a pipeline of development projects which will add significantly to our portfolio. Increasingly, our offices are in mixed-use environments which include retail and residential elements. Our 7.9 million sq ft of high quality office space includes Regent's Place and Paddington Central in the West End and Broadgate, the premier city office campus (50% share).

Our size and substance demands a responsible approach to business. We believe leadership on issues such as sustainability helps drive our performance and is core to the delivery of our overall objective of driving shareholder value and creating Places People Prefer.

Further details can be found on the British Land website at www.britishland.com.

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