Home Bargains Catford: 8am to 8pm, Sundays 10 to 4

Lewisham Council has granted consent for a set of illuminated Home Bargains signs at the former Homebase on Beckenham Hill Road in Catford, the clearest confirmation in the public record of who is taking over the borough’s largest empty retail warehouse.

The decision on advertisement application DC/26/144008 was issued on 7 July 2026 and grants consent for internally illuminated fascia and totem signs at 10 Beckenham Hill Road, SE6 3NU. The council’s delegated officer report names the applicant as T.J. Morris Ltd, the Liverpool company that trades as Home Bargains. Its registered office at Portal Way, Axis Business Park, Gillmoss, Liverpool L11 0JA matches the applicant address on the register, and is the address recorded for company 01505036 at Companies House. The Home Bargains website carries the same corporate name in its footer.

Update, 13 September 2026: the store is on Home Bargains’ own locator, with hours

When this was published on 14 August there was no opening date anywhere in the planning file. That has changed in the one place that counts. Home Bargains’ own store locator now carries a Catford entry, store A885, at 10 Beckenham Hill Road, London SE6 3NU, with trading hours and a facilities list against it:

• Monday to Saturday, 08:00 to 20:00
• Sunday, 10:00 to 16:00
• Facilities listed: cafe, parking, chilled and frozen, garden centre

Those facilities line up exactly with the three fascias Lewisham consented in July. The garden centre is GardenWorld and the cafe is the third sign on the application. A store with published hours on the company’s own locator is Home Bargains saying it is open or about to be, which is further than the planning register ever goes.

The licence position has not moved, but read that carefully. Lewisham’s published list of current premises licence applications was re-checked on 13 September 2026 and carries nothing for 10 Beckenham Hill Road or T.J. Morris Ltd. The caveat matters: the newest representation deadlines on that list are still in August, so the published PDF looks not to have been refreshed, and its silence is not proof that no application has been made.

Three brands, one site

The approved scheme is not for a single shop. The officer report describes signage “associated with the Home Bargains, GardenWorld and Café uses”, which is the standard three-part format the chain uses where it has a garden centre attached.

The consent covers:

• Three internally illuminated Home Bargains fascia signs on the north-west, north-east and south-east elevations of the main building, between 6.0m and 12.0m wide and 3.2m high. The largest, marked Sign A on approved drawing 001 rev 5, is 12,000mm by 3,200mm and weighs 384kg.
• Four smaller illuminated fascia signs carrying GardenWorld and Café branding on the cafe elevations, between 3.9m and 4.5m wide by 1.8m high.
• A non-illuminated “Happy Gardening” panel of roughly 3.37m by 1.0m on the north-east elevation, in vinyl graphics on a Dibond board.
• Two double-sided illuminated totems. Totem 1 stands on the Bromley Road frontage at about 9.64m high and 1.12m wide, carrying Home Bargains, GardenWorld, cafe and customer parking information. Totem 2 is a Home Bargains sign fixed to an existing totem structure in a red powder-coated aluminium casing.

All the illuminated signs use LED modules behind printed PVC faces. The submitted details give an average luminance of about 55 cd/m² for the fascia signs and 124 cd/m² for the totems. Officers measured that against the Institution of Lighting Professionals guide PLG05, which recommends urban advertisement luminance should not exceed 600 cd/m², and concluded the levels were acceptable next to Bromley Road.

Consent runs for five years and is tied to drawings 001 rev 5, 002 rev 3, 003 rev 2 and 111 rev B. A site notice went up on 2 June 2026 and letters went to nearby residents, businesses and ward councillors even though advertisement applications carry no statutory publicity requirement. No representations were received.

The building they are taking on

The officer report sets out the scale of the site, which sits in Catford South ward. The retail warehouse has a ground floor and a mezzanine and a total internal area of 4,765 square metres. The applicant’s planning statement puts the surface car park at 163 spaces including six accessible bays, on a site of 0.8 hectares once the building footprint is excluded.

The main two-way vehicle and pedestrian access is from Beckenham Hill Road, with a secondary exit-only route onto Bromley Road. Both are TfL Red Routes. The site has a public transport accessibility level of 3 and sits roughly 800m from Beckenham Hill and Bellingham stations, with the Green Man Community Centre opposite and Downham District Centre about 600m to the east. Peter Pan Pond, the duck pond that fronts Bromley Road, stays where it is.

The site also comes with an unusual set of constraints. The River Ravensbourne runs beneath it in a culvert, and it lies in Flood Zones 1 and 2, a Critical Drainage Area, an Air Quality Management Area and an Archaeological Priority Area, next to a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, under a Tree Preservation Order and within the setting of the Grade II listed St John’s Church across Bromley Road. Two separate condition discharges in August 2025, DC/25/141258 and DC/25/141259, dealt specifically with protecting that river culvert during the works.

A two-year paper trail

The signage consent is the latest step in a conversion that has been moving through the register since early 2025.

Two full applications were submitted on 6 February 2025 and both were granted on 16 May 2025. DC/25/138944 covered the buildings: new shopfronts, a relocated customer entrance, recladding of the main building and a new roof after the existing atriums come off, a reduced cafe footprint, new plant and fork lift enclosures, removal of the service yard canopies and new security fencing. DC/25/138943 covered the surrounding layout: the old garden centre fencing and canopy removed, new security fencing to the garden centre and holding area, new cycle parking, an electric vehicle charging point, and the car park resurfaced and relined.

Three non-material amendments followed. One granted on 12 August 2025 changed the external facade. Two more, granted on 28 April and 29 April 2026, swapped brick cafe piers for metal cladding on weight grounds, added a shopfront on the cafe’s garden-centre-facing elevation, kept the existing cafe slab, retained the wall along Beckenham Hill Road while removing the anti-climb mesh above it, revised the EV charging layout to add one accessible bay and a net gain of one parking space, added pedestrian crossing markings inside the car park, and replaced damaged block paving on the access road with tarmac.

What the record does not say

There is no opening date anywhere in the planning file, and the council’s register is not the place one would appear. Nor has an alcohol licence application for the site reached Lewisham’s published list of current premises licence applications as it stood on 14 August 2026, which lists applications with representation deadlines running into late August.

We have asked nothing of the company and are reporting only what the public record and the company’s own published information show. The store locator entry above is that update; if a licence application appears, we will add it.

What it means for you

• If you drive there, the car park is staying at broadly the size it was, 163 spaces with six accessible bays and one extra space added by the April amendment. New pedestrian crossing markings inside the car park were approved at the same time. Both approach roads are Red Routes, so do not stop on them: see our guide to parking in Lewisham.
• If you walk or use the bus, the entrance is moving. The approved scheme relocates the customer entrance and puts new shopfronts on the building, so the door you used for Homebase may not be the door you use next.
• If you live nearby, the brightest thing approved is the 9.64m totem on the Bromley Road frontage at 124 cd/m². That is about a fifth of the level the lighting guidance treats as the urban ceiling, and the signs are static, with no flashing or moving elements permitted.
• If you want to follow it, every document quoted here is public. Search the reference numbers on the council’s planning portal, or start with our guide to Lewisham planning applications for how to look up and comment on a scheme near you.

Source: Lewisham Council planning register, applications DC/26/144008, DC/25/138943, DC/25/138944, DC/25/140628, DC/26/143567, DC/26/143568, DC/25/141258 and DC/25/141259.