Thursday September 17th 2026
First Minister John Swinney planting to first tree alongside Center Parcs CEO Colin McKinlay
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
A Canadian company behind a £450m Scottish Borders holiday village is poised for financial restructuring, it has emerged.
Investor Brookfield is close to a recapitalisation that would value Center Parcs at about £4.5 billion.
Australian Retirement Trust and Mercer Super are among the incoming investors, with new backers expected to contribute over 75 per cent of the fresh funding, it has been reported.
Center Parcs has five villages in the UK: Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, Elveden Forest in Suffolk, Longleat Forest in Wiltshire, Woburn Forest in Bedfordshire, and Whinfell Forest in Cumbria.
There is also a village in Ireland called Longford Forest, located near Ballymahon.
Work recently started on a new Center Parcs village between Hawick and Selkirk with an earmarked opening date of 2029.
It will become the first Center Parcs location in Scotland.
Brookfield acquired Center Parcs from Blackstone for £2.4bn in 2015 and the firm has since invested more than £750m into the business.
An attempted sale of the holiday park chain was aborted at the end of 2023, with Brookfield unable to find a buyer willing to meet its £5bn price tag.
Center Parcs Scottish Borders will feature up to 700 lodges and apartments, an indoor swimming pool, shops, restaurants, a spa building and two new lochs for watersports.
It will be Center Parcs’ first new village since the opening of Longford Forest in Ireland in 2019.
As part of the development, Center Parcs will create an entirely new forest, planting hundreds of thousands of trees – the first time the company has established woodland from scratch.
Recapitalisation is the process of restructuring a company’s debt and equity mix to stabilize its capital structure often through the exchange of one form of financing for another.
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