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see also St. David's Shopping Centre, Swansea

The St. David's Centre is one of the principal shopping centres in Cardiff, capital of Wales. It has its main entrance on Queen Street and is joined internally with Queen's Arcade.

The centre attracts an average footfall of 600,000 a week and has a core catchment of 2.4 million people who help generate over £2.5 billion in retail spending. There are sixty one individual shops that cater for a broad demographic. The centre is anchored by Debenhams.

It is strategically situated close to central car parking and benefits from being close to public transport services. The centre is also adjacent to St. David's Hall.

The centre, and the whole of the south side of Cardiff's shopping area will be regenerated as part of the St David's 2 development.

St Davids 2 is a massive £675m extension of the centre and will see a large part of Cardiff's south city centre, much of it relatively underused thanks to it consisting of ugly 60s and 70s newbuild, completely redeveloped. It will add an extra 967,000 square ft of retail space to the city centre, including a 260,000 sq. ft John Lewis department store, 9 other large stores and a further 90 smaller shops in a two tiered 'grand arcade' shopping mall. It will also create 3000 car parking spaces, new bars and restaurants, a new 55,000sq ft civic library, new public spaces and 4500 permanent jobs. It will lift Cardiff, currently placed 8th in the UK retail hierarchy, into the top 5. Enabling works have been completed, the ice rink and Toys R Us have been demolished, and demolition is continuing apace on the the Hayes and other areas of the city. The temporary library has been completed and 6000 books have been moved from the old library, which has been demolished. Construction of a multi story car park for the Marriott Hotel has been completed, allowing work on the new civic library to begin. The whole development is scheduled to open in autumn 2009, although most of the development will be completed by summer 2008. See http://www.stdavids2.com for more information. The website will be relaunched shortly.

Upon completion it will become the largest shopping centre in the UK, as well as the busiest, with projected footfall expected to exceed the recent Birmingham Bullring development.