Popeyes has opened its first Colchester restaurant, taking a ground-floor unit in the former Marks & Spencer building on the High Street. The site, part of the Minerva House redevelopment, opens on Friday 11 September 2026. It is Essex’s latest addition to a UK estate that passed 100 restaurants in November 2025.
The unit at 38 High Street occupies part of the three-storey building that housed Marks & Spencer from 1931 until it closed in September 2022. Developer City and Country has converted the site, known as Minerva House, into shops, restaurants and workspace, with Popeyes and an incoming Umami restaurant among the first occupiers to fit out their units following handover in mid-2026. The Colchester opening is a new site rather than a relocation.
A new site on Colchester’s high street
Queuing for the Popeyes Colchester opening began at 9am on 11 September, with doors opening at 11am. The restaurant sits alongside the incoming Umami unit in the redeveloped Minerva House block, reusing a landmark High Street building rather than a retail park or drive-thru plot, the format through which many of Popeyes’ recent UK restaurants have opened. Unit type is one of the earliest decisions any operator faces, and our guide to how to open a restaurant in the UK sets out what a high street lease changes about fit-out cost and trading hours. Floor area for the Colchester unit has not been published.
Where Colchester diners previously had to travel
Before this opening, the nearest Popeyes to Colchester traded roughly 20 miles away on Southend High Street, meaning residents wanting the chain’s fried chicken had to travel out of the city. The Colchester restaurant brings that format directly onto the local high street for the first time, adding to a run of new Essex sites that has followed Popeyes UK’s wider expansion in recent years.
Operator not confirmed for the Colchester unit
No operator or Popeyes franchise partner is named for the Colchester restaurant. Popeyes runs an international franchising programme, but its own franchising site does not identify who operates specific UK restaurants. TDR Capital, the private equity firm that has backed the Popeyes UK rollout since an initial £130 million investment in 2023, states that the UK estate has grown more than fourfold since that investment, without saying on its own site whether restaurants are operated directly or through franchise partners. Popeyes has separately named a partnership with SSP Group for sites in airports and train stations, an arrangement that does not apply to this High Street restaurant.
The UK has no franchise disclosure law and no public register of franchise agreements, so where a brand does not name the operator of a specific site, as with Colchester, there is no other official source to confirm it. Everything therefore sits in the contract between the two parties, and our guide to franchise agreements in the UK sets out the terms a prospective franchisee should expect to find there. A brand publishing a franchise programme does not by itself establish who runs any one restaurant.
Good to know
The UK has no franchise disclosure law and no public register of franchise agreements, so where a brand does not name the operator of a specific site, as with Colchester, there is no other official source to confirm it. A brand publishing a franchise programme does not by itself establish who runs any one restaurant.
Free chicken marks the opening week
Popeyes is running a free-chicken offer through its opening week in Colchester, a launch tactic the chain has used at other UK openings to draw early footfall. The restaurant adds to a Popeyes UK estate that reached 100 sites in November 2025, with around 50 openings that year alone and more than 2,500 jobs created through that expansion. Popeyes has not published its next confirmed UK opening beyond Colchester. Readers looking for a chicken or QSR brand that is actively recruiting can browse the fast food franchises available in the UK.
