Glendale City Centre — Local services in Newcastle-Maitland

Generally, you go to Glendale for something and leave. It's not a place to enjoy just due to the sparse distance between stores. Browsing, takes about 7-12 minutes of walking from one arm to another or circumnavigating the carpark. Getting from the supermarket to the post office, to the bank can be 15 minutes or 2 hours. Just depends on the day or the route.

It's kind of awful compared to Charlestown Square or Westfield Kotara, but it makes for a good shopping hub area if you have a particular set of shopping requests to fulfill.

4 stars for the possibility of it getting better in the future, also because it's easy to find stores.

Parking is adequate, most of the time. Facilities are available, most of the time. Shops are a bit rough, lunch restaurants and services are limited, but it has most of the staple franchise locations, including a Harris Farm market, a few banks, 3 supermarkets almost next to each other, and a JB Hifi. The McDonald's / car wash / petrol station combo is unusual as well.

Haphazard describes the place well. It's very, very average at best, but it has room to improve and expand. For a small town, it would be ideal given it has a late night cinema with "deluxe" VMAX 3D projectors and free parking. But being 15 minutes from Kotara's central franchise superstore 'park', it's...

This is the worst layout of any shopping centre I've ever seen.

Instead of the shops all being housed under one roof, as per Westfield Kotara, Stockland Charlestown or ANY OTHER shopping centre that makes sense, there is one massive, sprawling car park with all of the shops around the perimeter of the car park!

This means if you want to shop at one end of the centre and then the other, you'll have to walk the entire perimeter of the car park. If you want to take a short cut through the car park, you can, but you'll need to dodge all of the traffic, plus it's not great when it's raining.

Apart from the insane layout (it really is bad, I mean did the architect let his kids have a crack at laying it out?), the selection of actual shops is pretty good. There's JB HiFi, K-Mart, Woolworths, Coles, etc. You can look the stores up on their web site.

I don't EVER go here to just wander around and browse through the shops. This is the sort of place to go when you have a certain shop in mind that you want to visit and you just go there, get what you want and leave.

If you have a vehicle that's tall, you won't have any problems with parking as there's no roof over the car park to contend with. Also, the parking in the centre is...

A terrible shopping centre - the only reason for having any stars as all, is that it has most of the major stores here. The worst thing is the layout - if you want to go to Kmart or Target, and also do your grocery shopping, you've gotta go all around the whole shopping centre to get there, instead of a traditional shopping complex where shops are close to each other. It is all open-air, so in summer it is really hot, and whenever it rains, you get wet going between buildings, and even just walking along the footpath. There is a distinct lack of eating venues - one or 2 cafes - don't ever want to come for lunch or a meal. A very poor shopping complex design - if you're coming for 1 particular shop it's good to come and park out the front, but don't ever come if you want to do some general shopping or if you want to go to more than one store. Oh, and now that the bypass road cuts through the shopping centre, the traffic is 3x more than before, so it takes forever to get in and out of the complex. Farmers markets every weekend makes it worse to park, and impossible to visit some of the stores without walking through the weather. Avoid, except in very specific...