Hersham Green Shopping Centre: From Safeway to a Waitrose Freehold

Hersham Green Shopping Centre stands immediately east of Hersham Green, off Molesey Road, and carries most of the village’s everyday shopping. In February 2026 it became something genuinely unusual: a shopping centre owned outright by the supermarket that anchors it.

Before Waitrose

The site was trading long before Waitrose arrived. When the Partnership’s in-house magazine described the new branch in 2005, it recorded that the unit had been a Safeway, acquired by Morrisons, and that the interior was stripped out completely before reopening. Several of the people who had worked there under the old name stayed on through the change.

That makes the centre older than its best-known tenant, though none of the sources consulted here records the year it was built.

The 2005 opening

Waitrose Hersham, branch 765, opened on 9 June 2005. The Gazette recorded it as the first Waitrose ever opened by a celebrity: the Olympic sailing gold medallist Sarah Webb MBE. The account describes a 22,000 square foot shop floor, food service counters, and a 230 space car park that was reported almost full two hours after the doors opened.

The branch also arrived into unusually crowded territory. Waitrose already had shops at Esher, Weybridge and Cobham, so Hersham was filling in a gap between existing branches rather than opening new ground.

The redevelopment that was refused

In 2024 the centre was the subject of a hybrid planning application, Elmbridge reference 2024/0498. It combined an outline application to redevelop the shopping centre car park for residential accommodation, under use classes C2 and C3, with new pedestrian accesses from Burwood Road and New Berry Lane and a new vehicle access from New Berry Lane, alongside a full application to part demolish and refurbish the centre itself, including new public toilets, car and cycle parking and landscaping.

Elmbridge Borough Council refused the application, with a decision dated 23 October 2024. Current applications affecting the village are tracked on our Hersham development and planning page, which takes no position for or against any scheme.

Waitrose buys the freehold

On 5 February 2026 the John Lewis Partnership announced that Waitrose had acquired the freehold of the centre, which it put at 54,000 square feet. The purchase made Waitrose the landlord of the 16 other retail units on the site, among them Costa Coffee and Hersham Pharmacy, and the Partnership said it would continue to provide the parking that serves both the centre and the wider village.

The Partnership presented the deal as securing the future of the Hersham shop and as part of a wider billion pound, multi-year investment in the Waitrose estate, which it said had transformed 23 shops during 2025. Those are the owner’s own words about its own purchase, and they are reported here as such.

The two Partnership accounts do not describe the shop identically. The 2026 announcement gives the store as 27,000 square feet, while the 2005 magazine piece described a 22,000 square foot shop floor. The figures may simply be measuring different things, a total store area against a trading floor, and no source consulted here reconciles them.

What the sequence shows plainly enough is a change of footing. A scheme to build homes on the car park was refused in 2024, and sixteen months later the anchor tenant bought the ground under its own feet. The sources record both events; none of them states that the first caused the second.

Visiting

The centre sits on Molesey Road at the KT12 4HL postcode, a short walk from the green itself and from the parade of shops that faces it. Hersham station is roughly a fifteen to twenty minute walk away, and the car park that served the 2005 opening still serves the centre today. For eating and drinking in the village more widely, see our Hersham food and drink guide; for the town centre equivalent a few miles north, see The Heart and Walton town centre.