The Peel Group is a British infrastructure and property investment business, based in Manchester. In 2022, its Peel Land and Property estate extends to of buildings, and over of land and water. Peel retains minority stakes in its former ports business and MediaCityUK. The Trafford Centre, which opened in 1998, is widely regarded as Peel's landmark development. It was sold in 2011 to Capital Shopping Centres for £1.6 billion, making it then the most expensive acquisition in British property history. £700 million of the consideration was in shares and Peel continued to buy shares in the purchaser that went into administration, eliminating share value, in 2020. The Peel Group held a series of other substantial investments in listed businesses including Land Securities Group plc and Pinewood Shepperton plc, and in 2022 owns 14.1% of Harworth Group plc History Name and listings The Peel Group was known from 1973 to 1981 as Peel Mills (Holdings) Ltd; from 1981 to 2004 as Peel Holdings plc, and then the wider organisation took its present form. Inspired by the Peel Tower near his native Bury, Whittaker retained the name Peel Mills Ltd for his property and cotton business. After a period on the Manchester Stock Exchange, Peel Holdings listed on the London Stock Exchange Official List in 1983. It transferred to the Alternative Investment Market in January 2000 before the Whittaker family and Olayan Group majority shareholders bought out Peel Holdings' 6.63% minority shareholders in 2004, taking the business private. Early acquisitions John Whittaker began assembling the business in the 1960s, supplying aggregate from his family's quarries to projects such as the M63 motorway. Once quarries were exhausted he turned them into landfill waste sites, the profits invested in cotton businesses with property assets. He consolidated the cotton processing in new buildings, often built on top of the now full landfill sites, and redeveloped the former cotton mills as light industrial units to let. By 1977 a majority of the firm's activity was property development, and by the early 1980s that was predominantly new-build, industrial units and out-of-town retail stores. Manchester Ship Canal From 1971, Whittaker acquired shares in the Manchester Ship Canal Company that unlike most other British canals had not been nationalised post-World War II. Peel sold its cotton business for £22 million to finance the purchase of more canal shares and in 1986 proposed developing an out-of-town shopping centre, that would