Exchange Ilford

A mall stitched into a street. Exchange Ilford is the main retail shopping mall of Ilford, in east London’s London Borough of Redbridge. It sits on Ilford High Road in the town centre, where it opened on 6 September 1991. For a period it was owned by The Mall Fund; after a sale it took its present name in late 2010 or early 2011. Later ownership passed through the London-based Dutch firm Meyer Bergman, reported in 2012, and then Capital & Regional from 2017.

Reading the section

The most telling thing about this building is not its facade but its section. The centre trades from three levels of retail, and its architectural design means the lower mall is not directly accessible from the High Road — shoppers must enter at the middle level to traverse the full length of the mall. Above sits an upper level of retail and a food court, reached from the middle. Movement between floors runs through a series of lifts, stairs and escalators threaded through the interior, while some stores climb across two or more levels at once. The result is a layered, slightly puzzle-like interior, where the ground you walk in on is not the ground the mall is built upon.

Quirks of an evolving plan. The layout has rewarded tenants who reshape it. Marks & Spencer once operated as two stores bisected by the mall site, accessible from the High Road and from facing middle-level entrances — an arrangement the source likens to Broadway Bexleyheath. TK Maxx similarly began as two opposing stores on the lower mall before an extension bridged across the walkway to unify them, effectively splitting that level into three segments. Such adaptations have continued: a Lidl, a PureGym, an NHS medical facility under redevelopment by 2023, and by 2024 a food-led retail quarter named Cranbrook Walk on the former lower-level TK Maxx site.

The vanished centrepiece

Where the wishes went. Among the mall’s past architectural features were a granite floating sphere and a wishing fountain — both now gone. It is a quietly poignant detail: a water feature that once invited coins and small hopes, here only as a record of what the interior used to hold.

Access is by car, with parking off Havelock Street and Ley Street, and by the many Transport for London bus services serving central Ilford.