What happened to the Headrow Centre?

From department store to shopping centre

For most of the 20th century the site, on the south side of The Headrow between Albion Street and Lands Lane, belonged to Schofields, a Leeds department store that traded on The Headrow from 1901. Wikipedia’s history of Schofields describes how the store was rebuilt with an adjoining shopping centre, and how the department store closed in 1996.

The centre itself opened in 1987, originally as the Schofields Centre, with three levels of shops and a food court linked by escalators and a glass lift, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post. It later traded as the Headrow Centre (also called the Headrow Shopping Centre).

The Core

After a refurbishment it was relaunched in 2009 as The Core (Leeds-List). Many of its inside units stood empty in later years; a 2023 planning statement described it as suffering from “a poor internal layout alongside several long-term vacancies” (DPP, September 2023).

Demolition and what comes next

In March 2024 Leeds City Council’s planning committee approved a scheme called Garnet Exchange for the site: around 800 student bedrooms above new ground-floor shops on The Headrow and Lands Lane, with two new arcades running through it (Corstorphine & Wright, Construction Enquirer). Demolition was under way by the end of January 2025 (Yorkshire Evening Post), and in July 2026 the paper reported it was nearing completion (Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 July 2026).

We will add the new shops to the directory once they open and we can confirm them.

The shops next to the site today

The street-front units either side of the site are listed in our directory — see the south side of the walk around Lands Lane or the map.