House of Fraser (Binns), Darlington (1 Mar 2011)

It’s not one of my most well-read posts, but some of you may remember my blog from last March about the disappointing state of the toilet facilities in Darlington’s landmark House of Fraser (Binns) store.

While at first glance it might seem a slightly frivolous topic, the post was making a serious point about the importance of retailers’ attention to detail, and ensuring that all aspects of the store experience – especially in a premium department store – meet customer expectations and convey an appropriately upmarket image for the brand. While the Middlesbrough store’s attractive facilities do just that, I couldn’t help feeling that Darlington’s were rather letting the side down.

Happily, I’m pleased to report that action has been taken – Revisiting the store yesterday, I noticed that the old grimy floor covering has been replaced - a quick fix, for sure, but one that makes a big and positive difference until a more comprehensive refurbishment can be carried out.

...how it looked before (1 Mar 2011)

...and the improved version (5 Jan 2012)

Of course, whether the improvement is due to my inf-loo-ence is impossible to say, but either way it’s very welcome.

I don’t propose Soult’s Retail Loo to become a regular feature, but if you do wish to flag the frightful or salute the shining, you may feel free, as always, to add your comment below.

Soon-to-open Superdry, Durham (16 Nov 2011)

Superdry – the SuperGroup-owned fashion chain of the moment – is gearing up to open its new store in Durham’s Silver Street at 9am this coming Friday (18 November), though the shop was still under wraps when I went past this morning.

By opening in the midst of the Durham Lumiere festival – which runs from 17-20 November, and attracts large crowds to the city – Superdry should be well placed for a successful launch.

Until recently, the unit at  30-31 Silver Street was occupied by Burton and Dorothy Perkins. However, in keeping with Sir Philip Green’s property consolidation strategy for Arcadia Group, both brand’s ranges now feature instead in the city’s nearby BHS store, the anchor tenant for the Prince Bishops shopping centre.

Soon-to-open Superdry, Durham (16 Nov 2011)

While Arcadia shrinks its estate, Superdry is rapidly expanding it – and since the first Superdry store opened in 2004, the chain’s growth has been spectacular. Durham will be the 57th standalone Superdry store in the UK – and only its third in the North East, after Newcastle and Metrocentre – alongside 21 shops under the Cult brand and more than 40 concessions in House of Fraser, Harrods and Selfridges department stores.

Cult store in Oxford (11 Nov 2011)

The Superdry estate has also grown rapidly overseas, and currently comprises more than 100 stores across Venezuela, the USA, Taiwan, Spain, South Korea, Panama, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Indonesia, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Austria and Australia. The Superdry website has also become a major sales channel, buoyed by its free delivery offer within the UK, Europe and North America.

Not surprisingly, this expansion has fuelled rapid growth both in group sales – up 42% in the three months to 30 October, following the 66% increase recorded in the previous quarter – and in profit (£47.3m pre-tax profit in the year to 1 May 2011). However, an absence of like-for-like comparisons makes it difficult to discern how sales are holding up in established stores, and the extent of any cannibalisation by newly opened shops.

Commentators’ questioning of how long SuperGroup can sustain such growth – alongside recent distribution difficulties (now apparently resolved) and a sense that the Superdry brand may be becoming overexposed – makes it one of the most fascinating retailers to follow right now, and is reflected in the business’s fluctuating share price. In March 2010, SuperGroup successfully floated on the London Stock Exchange, with the company’s share price subsequently rocketing from its initial £5 to a peak of more than £18 in February this year. However, the share price has since fallen back to just over £6.

Nevertheless, for all those question marks, Superdry’s development of good-looking stores on the high street in the midst of an economic downturn is both impressive and welcome. Presumably due to its student-heavy population, Durham has done well to secure a standalone Superdry store ahead of the larger North East retail centres of Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Darlington, and the chances are that it will be a success. However, time will tell how much further Superdry can grow – in our region, the UK, and overseas – before it starts to see increasingly diminishing returns.

Former Woolworths (now temporary BHS), Swindon (11 Sep 2011)

If you saw my earlier post about the shiny new BHS in Swindon, you might be wondering what happened to the retailer during the 18-month period that its old store was being redeveloped. Well, rather conveniently, there was an empty unit in nearby Regent Street where it was able to open a temporary store: the site of Swindon’s former Woolworths.

At the time of Woolies’ collapse in 2008, the Swindon store (store #38) was one of the longest established in the country. It opened at 23-25 Regent Street on 12 September 1914 – almost 97 years to the day before my visit – and underwent a series of extensions and redevelopments in 1936, 1973, 1980 and 1995.

Old postcard of Woolworths in Swindon, c.1960

Sadly, the rather functional present-day frontage bears no resemblance to the more elegant, cinema-style façade that existed previously – similar to the one still found at Chester-le-Street. However, the attractive turreted Next building (in the middle of both shots, above and below) ensures that there is at least some visual link between the 1960s and present-day views along the street.

A similar view along Regent Street today (11 Sep 2011)

Now that BHS’s new store is open, I’d rather expected to find the former Woolworths store vacated again. However, BHS looks to be hanging on to the space for the moment, badging it as a BHS Furniture Clearance Outlet.

When you visit Swindon, that word – outlet – seems to assail you at every turn, with both positive and negative consequences for the town. In the Swindon Designer Outlet, owned by McArthur Glen, the town has one of the busiest and best outlet shopping centres in the country, housing 120 stores in the Grade II-listed Great Western Railway Works – a truly fantastic series of spaces.

Swindon Designer Outlet (11 Sep 2011)

With outlet stores from big names such as John Lewis, Next and M&S, as well as designer brands like Aquascutum, Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger, there’s little wonder that the centre was packed with shoppers when I visited. Indeed, according to CACI Retail Footprint data, the outlet centre alone generates £160m of annual expenditure – equivalent to Tamworth’s vast Ventura Retail Park.

Swindon Designer Outlet (11 Sep 2011)

However, while bringing shoppers and their spend into Swindon, the Designer Outlet is perhaps just a little too far away from the town centre – a good 10 minutes’ walk – to have much of a positive knock-on effect. On the contrary, there are bound to be some names whose presence at the Designer Outlet rules them out of taking space in the town centre proper.

House of Fraser Outlet, Swindon (11 Sep 2011)

Once in the town centre, the outlet theme continues, somewhat controversially. In 2008, Swindon’s established House of Fraser store was rebadged as a House of Fraser Outlet, featuring end-of-the-line branded stock from other stores in the chain. While better than losing House of Fraser completely, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a retrograde step.

Looking around the store on Sunday, it felt rather like a more upmarket TJ Hughes, with a slight ‘jumble sale’ feel and the sense that it’s no longer really a proper department store. For that, shoppers must go along the street to Debenhams, which itself makes a fairly unglamorous impression from the outside.

Debenhams, Swindon (11 Sep 2011)

Swindon might have a shiny John Lewis at Home on its outskirts, and the country’s most modern BHS in its centre, but I have to confess to being slightly underwhelmed by the town centre – both in terms of its retail offer and the overall quality of the public realm.

Perhaps my expectations were too high? After all, with annual retail expenditure (according to CACI) of £350m, Swindon town centre is barely a third of the size of nearby Bristol or Reading (each £1.2bn), and ranks below both Darlington (£360m) and Middlesbrough (£430m) in the North East. In my previous post, I cited John Ryan’s assertion that the new BHS was “without doubt the best shop in Swindon”, and it’s hard to really argue with that claim.

So, against this mixed backdrop, what might the future hold for Swindon’s former Woolworths site once BHS finally moves on? Usefully, the town’s growth and regeneration company, Forward Swindon, commissioned a ‘Town Centre Healthcheck’ from GVA Grimley in May last year, which reported in November.

Drawing from the FOCUS real estate database, this report found that a relatively small number of retailers (30) had a requirement for space in Swindon, particularly in comparison to other large centres in the south, such as Oxford, Reading and Bristol. Of these, just two – Asda Living and the now-much-reduced TJ Hughes – had a requirement for more than 15,000 sq ft of retail space.

Of course, Swindon’s recent BHS development – and similar retail schemes elsewhere – remind us that if developers build the right quality of space in the right locations, retailers will often find a requirement. As Swindon looks forward, I can’t help thinking that the Woolworths site might need another redevelopment of its own if it’s to have a sustainable and long-term future as prime retail space.

Newcastle's TJ Hughes (8 Aug 2011)

There was good news for Newcastle city centre earlier this week, with the announcement that the TJ Hughes store in Grainger Street had been sold, preventing the loss of 76 jobs. However, the collapsed department store chain’s Middlesbrough branch is one of eight that will close down for good by Thursday next week (18 August), leaving a large hole in the town’s Captain Cook Square shopping centre.

The Newcastle store and another in Widnes have been bought by Lewis’s Home Retail, a company owned by The Benross Group – a home and garden wholesaler that is already one of TJ Hughes’ major suppliers. The deal brings the total number of TJ’s sites acquired by Lewis’s to six, following the purchase of stores in Liverpool, Glasgow, Eastbourne and Sheffield – as well as the TJ Hughes brand – at the start of August.

Lewis’s Home Retail acquired the rights to the iconic Lewis’s brand only last month, following the sale of assets owned by the collapsed Vergo Retail chain. However, Benross’ MD Anil Juneja has confirmed that the acquired stores will retain their existing TJ Hughes fascias with a view to building the chain back up again over time.

Lewis’s, meanwhile, is set to be revived separately, starting with a retail park store in Bury. The submitted plans for the ‘Lewis’s Home’ store suggest that while the relaunched chain will focus on homewares rather than a full department store offer, the familiar blue and white Lewis’s logo (below) is poised to make a comeback.

Revived Lewis's Home logo

The sale of the Newcastle TJ Hughes store avoids the headache of a large empty unit in a slightly off-centre pitch within Newcastle city centre. Covering three floors and with a gross area of 91,000 sq ft (8,500 sqm), the unit is one of the city’s largest outside of Eldon Square and Northumberland Street, and its vacancy would most likely have seen the space being divided up.

TJ Hughes has traded from the purpose-built unit since 2002, but the location is associated with two of Newcastle’s most well-loved department store names: Bainbridge (now John Lewis), which expanded across the site from 1838 to 1976 before relocating to Eldon Square; and Binns (House of Fraser), which occupied the site between 1977 and 1995. Most of the site was demolished and redeveloped following Binns’ departure, but apart from not having a frontage to Market Street, today’s TJ Hughes has a broadly similar footprint to its predecessor.

TJ Hughes, Newcastle (13 Aug 2011)

Interestingly, of the six TJ Hughes sites acquired by Lewis’s, three have a House of Fraser connection. As well as Newcastle, the stores in Sheffield and Eastbourne are both ex-House of Fraser sites that TJ Hughes acquired in 1997. The Liverpool site is the original TJ Hughes flagship in London Road; Glasgow’s Trongate store is a former C&A; and the Widnes shop occupies a unit in the modern Green Oaks Shopping Centre.

Former Woolworths (now TJ Hughes), Westfield Derby (23 Dec 2010)

Indeed, over the years TJ Hughes has played an important role in mopping up large-format space that other retailers have left behind. Most recently, it has acquired a number of high-profile former Woolworths sites, including in Belfast, Derby, Hanley, Southend, Walsall and Nuneaton.

Former Woolworths (now TJ Hughes), Nuneaton (24 Aug 2010)

When I visited Nuneaton in August last year, work was underway to transform the town’s former Woolworths into a TJ Hughes; now, after less than ten months of trading, it will be closing this coming Sunday (14 August). In towns like Nuneaton – which already lost its Marks & Spencer store earlier this year – filling the former Woolworths site a second time may not be an easy task.

TJ Hughes, Sunderland (7 Sep 2009)

With six TJ Hughes stores saved, and 30 set to close over the next week, the future of the remaining 21 stores in the estate – including the Sunderland branch – is still in doubt. There’s a possibility that Benross may snap up one or two more, but its purchase of the TJ Hughes brand – ruling out any other retailers trading TJ’s stores under the existing fascia – suggests that there is little chance of more stores being acquired as going concerns.

A more likely scenario is that retailers such as BHS, H&M, Wilkinson, Marks & Spencer, Primark and Debenhams will snap up the best sites once they become vacant. The site in upmarket Lichfield, for example, may appeal to the rapidly expanding Beales or to M&S, which already has a successful Simply Food store in the city.

TJ Hughes, Lichfield (19 Mar 2010)

For both Middlesbrough and Sunderland, however, the challenge will be to find large retailers that aren’t already represented in those locations. Of the two, Middlesbrough is arguably the better unit, anchoring the modern Captain Cook Square shopping centre close to the prime Linthorpe Road thoroughfare; Sunderland’s, in High Street West, is in a fairly central location close to The Bridges shopping centre, but suffers from being an older, less attractive property that hasn’t been much improved since it housed a branch of Littlewoods.

With both Middlesbrough and Sunderland already home to almost all the likely candidates – including BHS, H&M, Debenhams, M&S, TK Maxx, Primark, Wilkinson and Next – it will be interesting to see who else, if anyone, steps up to fill the gaps.

Not what you expect in an upmarket department store

Apologies for the Richard Whiteley-style headline and the rather gruesome photograph, but if Mary Portas was looking for another retail-related programme idea she could do worse than turn her attention to customer toilet facilities – celebrating the good and exposing the horrible.

Customer loos are a staple of most department stores, and a necessity for those that have a restaurant or café. In the context of shops’ facilities increasingly taking the place of those that local councils once provided, many retailers do an admirable job.

As you would expect, John Lewis’s toilets are usually spotless – resplendent with upmarket Dyson hand driers, and showing the attention to detail and superb customer service that has underpinned the recent success of the Partnership’s business. Given the high footfall, the big four supermarkets also do a pretty good job of providing facilities that are clean, pleasant and well equipped – the same qualities that you expect to find on the supermarket salesfloor.

Alas, not all shops’ toilet facilities are, quite literally, as sparkling, particularly where stores are in older buildings or in need of a refit more generally. The example above – photographed yesterday – looks like a dodgy backstreet loo, but in fact it’s the gents’ customer toilets in House of Fraser in Darlington, serving both the restaurant and the wider store.

Let’s be clear – the state of a store’s toilets alone probably isn’t going to put a customer off going there to shop. However, grimy, unmodernised facilities aren’t what you expect to find in a department store that positions itself at the premium end of the market. By all means invest in celebrating the relaunch of Biba – but don’t forget the small, yet important, details that can impact negatively on your brand.

John Lewis Oxford Street, London

Given how long it’s been since the weekly trading figures for John Lewis department stores last recorded a year-on-year fall in sales, it’s little wonder that the 2.2% sales drop announced today seems to be causing a few jitters. 

On the back of this month’s VAT increase and an apparent “astonishing” plunge in consumer confidence, it’s inevitable that any sign of a wobble in trading at the UK’s retail bellweather will catch the eye of commentators. We’ll have to wait for future weeks’ figures to see whether this fall is merely, as John Lewis suggests, a weather-skewed blip, or if it does mark the beginning of something more unpleasant. 

John Lewis Leicester

For the half year as a whole, however – which ends with next week’s figures – it’s hard to argue that a 10% year-on-year rise in sales is anything but impressive, even if the stellar rise in online sales (38.9% up year on year) does to some extent mask a comparatively less strong performance from John Lewis’s shops. Of those, the half-year performances at Cambridge (+9.4%), Leicester (+8.8%) and Oxford Street (+8.1%) are the most improved.

Thinking about the John Lewis sales figures brought to mind my third ever blog post – a whole 170 posts ago – written back at the height of the recession in July 2009 when weakened retailers, post-Woolies, were still dropping like flies. It’s worth placing today’s 2.2% John Lewis sales drop in the context of the trading picture that I described back then. By way of reminder, here’s some of what I wrote 18 months ago:

Giving a picture of slightly longer-term trends, the comparisons given for the current half-year, rather than just the last week, tend to be more insightful.

These remind us just how challenging John Lewis’s trading was between February and April – even after what is now 13 successive weeks of positive figures compared to 2008, Cambridge is still the only physical store to have enjoyed better sales (up 1.5%) over the current 24-week period than it did during the same stretch a year ago.

In contrast, it’s interesting that John Lewis’s worst performing store over the last 24 weeks has been John Lewis Bristol at the out-of-town Mall at Cribbs Causeway, where sales are down a whole 12.5% compared to last year.

Comparing figures for that half-year with the most recent one show just how much things have improved. Cambridge’s recent +9.4% performance is clearly much better than the +1.5% that I wrote about in July 2009, while Bristol – down 12.5% year on year back then – is currently registering a sales fall of only 0.6% for the current half year. Of course, the flipside is that these comparisons remind us how bad things could yet get, if all the worst fears of a double-dip recession are realised.

John Lewis Bristol. Photograph by Mark Leaver

While Bristol was the weakest performing John Lewis store in early 2009, it’s interesting that current half year figures award that slightly dubious status to Newcastle. Sales at the former Bainbridge are down 3.5% compared to a year ago, with Liverpool (-1.3%) the only other store to record a sales decrease of more than 1%.

However, just as I observed back then that the Bristol store’s figures were undoubtedly impacted by the recent opening of Cabot Circus, one must imagine that the opening of Newcastle’s Debenhams-anchored St Andrew’s Way, in February last year, has had a similar effect on the John Lewis up here. In the same way as Bristol’s figures have now smoothed out, it will be interesting to see what the JL weekly stats for Newcastle look like once the opening of the Eldon Square extension is no longer skewing the year-on-year comparisons.

Even with the overall boost in sales and footfall that the Eldon Square extension has surely given Newcastle city centre, it was always likely that there would be some cannibalisation of existing stores. However, the apparent impact of Debenhams’ opening raises interesting questions about how far Newcastle could support any more upmarket department stores, with House of Fraser, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols all having been linked to the city at various points in the last twenty years.

Maybe we should just be content with our John Lewis, Fenwick and Debenhams – after all, since the closure of Joplings last year, it is still two more department stores than Sunderland has…

Original Woolworths (now House of Fraser), Briggate, Leeds (21 Jan 2011)

As you would expect, I used the opportunity of being in Leeds last week to check out the city centre’s former Woolies sites.

Leeds’ original Woolworths in Briggate – store #5 – was one of the very first to open in the UK, in 1911. Following a 1959 rebuild, it also became one of the largest city centre sites from which Woolworths ever traded. The black and white postcard below shows the store (the prominent white building in the centre) prior to its redevelopment, while the colour view (taken from the opposite direction of Briggate) captures the rebuilt store’s 1960s heyday. Matthias Robinson’s department store – today’s Debenhams – is visible in the foreground, while Woolworths can be seen towards the far right of the scene.

Old postcard of Briggate prior to Woolworths rebuilding

Postcard of Briggate, Leeds, c1960s. Woolworths is on the right

Just as Newcastle’s main Woolies store was sold off in 1984, so the Leeds store was also disposed of in the same year. In turn, the House of Fraser-owned department store group Schofields took over the site, in 1988, while its longstanding Headrow store – opened in 1901 on the site of today’s Core shopping centre – was redeveloped and reduced in size.

Subsequently, the temporary Schofields (rebadged as Rackhams) was retained alongside the original Schofields store. In 1996, however, the original Schofields on The Headrow was closed down – just six years after it had been rebuilt – while the Briggate store took on the House of Fraser name that it retains to this day. Even now, however, the Briggate frontage is remarkably unchanged from how it appeared as a Woolworths store more than half a century ago. 

Former Woolworths (now Home Bargains), Merrion Centre, Leeds (21 Jan 2011)

Some time after the Briggate Woolworths closed, a new but much smaller Woolies (#1142) opened in the Merrion Centre at the opposite end of town. This lasted until the retailer’s collapse into administration, closing its doors for the last time on 2 January 2009. Just days later, however, Home Bargains was revealed as the new tenant of the 15,158 sq ft unit.

1970s postcard of Merrion Centre

Conscious of the hazards of shopping centre security guards, I made a point of tracking down the centre manager’s office to ask permission to take a photograph. Given the prominent signposting of the office from the mall, I imagined that the management would be accustomed to – or would even welcome – members of the public dropping in with enquiries.

Merrion Centre entrance, Leeds (21 Jan 2011)

However, even once I’d explained who I was, the reception I received was rather frosty and disinterested – a pity, given that my intention was to say positive things about a centre that is, admittedly, slightly dated in ambience, but has a pretty good mix of value retailers, a strong anchor in Morrisons, and very few empty units at all.

Informed that I would have to get permission from the manager of each and every store whose shopfront I wanted to photograph, I duly set off, with some trepidation, to Home Bargains. Happily, the store manager was out and about on the shopfloor, and was delightful – warm, friendly, and pleased for me to take a photograph of his shop.

When I was filming with the BBC last year, I gained an equally positive impression of the smart and personable staff in Hartlepool’s Home Bargains store, and it all reflects well on the TJ Morris-owned business. I don’t know if ‘Secret Shopper’ Mary Portas is tackling discount variety stores as part of her current crusade “to give shoppers the service they deserve”, but my experience of Home Bargains certainly suggests that it is possible to build a growing and profitable discount business at the same time as nurturing a friendly, winning workforce.

Image from 'Scotland's Shops' book, courtesy of Historic Scotland

One of the nice things about running my own architecture subject gateway, Sapling.info, is that I get the opportunity to read about plenty of interesting buildings and places. 

Earlier this week I paid a visit to the attractive and information-packed website of Historic Scotland, ahead of updating Sapling.info’s review of that site. While there, I was excited to see that the organisation has just published ‘Scotland’s Shops’, a 199-page book that examines the architectural history of shops in Scotland. My enthusiasm will hardly surprise you – regular readers of Soult’s Retail View will know by now that retail history is one of the areas that most interests me, even if my knowledge and coverage of Scotland, E&M aside, has been rather thin to date.

Image from 'Scotland's Shops' book, courtesy of Historic Scotland

‘Scotland’s Shops’ certainly sounds like the kind of book that will be appearing on my bookcase before too long, though I was a little surprised to see that it’s not yet listed on Amazon.co.uk. It seems like I may have to have a go at ordering from Historic Scotland’s own web store instead.

The book itself has quite an interesting story behind it, being written by Dr Lindsay Lennie – an expert on the conservation of historic shops – as part of a three-year Research Fellowship funded by Historic Scotland.

Image from 'Scotland's Shops' book, courtesy of Historic Scotland

The resulting publication apparently “explains the chronological history of the design of shops in Scotland, gives a technical background to the elements and materials used in their construction, as well as advice on their conservation, and also includes a gazetteer of retail buildings around Scotland.” In doing so, it “celebrates the history of Scotland’s retail architecture in a timeline from medieval markets to the post-war period”, featuring shops “from all around Scotland from Lerwick to Stranraer.”

Image from 'Scotland's Shops' book, courtesy of Historic Scotland

Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Minister for Culture, formally launched the book last week and rightly flagged up the importance of historic shops on various levels – whether for the stories underlying them, for the celebration of craftsmanship, or simply for their architectural delight:

“Traditional shops and shop fronts form the heart of many high streets across Scotland and play an important part in our history.  Many long established family businesses and new owners who have inherited a shop with original tiling, shelving or a cast iron frontage are proud of the significance of these shops and want to ensure their survival for future generations to appreciate.

“Traditional Scottish building materials are also vital to the conservation and maintenance of our built heritage.  Many towns and cities have their own distinctive and recognisable shop front styles. The fact that so many of them have survived across the country is testament to the quality and durability of the materials used to construct them and the skill with which they were used.  

“Our shops  form the economic and social building blocks of our town centres – they are woven into the social fabric of our towns and communities. Their architecture and conservation are of great importance in order to retain town centres that are individual, appealing and meaningful.”

Given the book’s celebration of Scottishness and individuality, there’s both logic and incongruity in it being launched at Jenners department store in Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

Jenners' Grand Hall. Photograph by Steve F

Operating from that site since 1838, it’s true that Jenners remains one of Scotland’s most iconic and well-known shops, with its baronial exterior and celebrated Grand Hall making it a must-see for any visitor to Edinburgh. On the other hand, House of Fraser’s purchase of Jenners in 2005 has meant that the store is no longer particularly individual, nor especially Scottish – House of Fraser may have been founded in Glasgow, but its corporate HQ has long been based in London.

I haven’t visited Jenners in Princes Street since the HoF takeover, though the much smaller branch at Loch Lomond Shores in Balloch, which I visited in 2008, did strike me as a rather odd combination of twee Scottish souvenirs against a backdrop of HoF own-brand and designer labels.

Jenners, Edinburgh. Photograph by Richard Webb

This battle to define what Jenners is and stands for – trying to reconcile its quirky, independent heritage with the shinier (but arguably less interesting) personality of its corporate parent – seems to continually vex retail commentators. Retail Week’s John Ryan, for example, earlier this year described Jenners in Princes Street as “failing to measure up” – “it may have the brands, the point of sale and the aspiration to match its sister store in Glasgow, but… it’s a rabbit warren [and] difficult to find your way around.” Even Mary Portas, the BBC’s Queen of Shops, has previously lamented what she sees as the store’s loss of individuality under HoF’s ownership:

“Jenners’ internal design is absolutely stunning, but it feels like House of Fraser got a hold of it and it’s just ended up with a slightly hybrid shop instead of one that is still ‘Jenners’. Now it doesn’t know what it is – Arthur or Martha.”

Perhaps more critical, however, is if the feelings of the retail gurus are shared by actual shoppers. Judging from the numerous comments on the Mary Portas article – “just another House of Fraser”, according to one reader, or “just Frasers with a higher price tag” by another – you get the impression that they could well be.

Scotland’s shops might indeed, as Fiona Hyslop contends, be “woven into the social fabric of our towns and communities.” However, lose what makes a store cherished in the first place and there’s always a danger that the stitching will start to come undone.

Thank you to Richard Webb and Steve F for the shots of Jenners. The photographs are © Copyright Richard Webb and © Copyright Steve F respectively, and both licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.

Back of the WHSmith store in Redcar (17 Sep 2009)

Visiting Redcar today, I was amused to spot a little throwback to the past in the form of an old WHSmith fascia, featuring the once familiar cube of ‘W’, ‘H’ and ‘S’ letters. 

Curiously, the main frontage of the store in Redcar High Street features the more up-to-date blue fascia with white text (below), but someone has either forgotten to update the goods entrance or decided that it really isn’t terribly important. 

The more commonly seen WHSmith logo these days

It must be about a decade since I last saw the old logo featured on a WHSmith store, though – I remember it being on the old Eldon Square branch in Newcastle, before that closed and business moved to the shiny new branch on the old Littlewoods site in Northumberland Street. Needless to say, readers, it would be fun to hear of any other places that you know of where the former logo is still in situ. 

It is interesting, though, how a logo that looks fairly innocuous at the point of being retired begins to look rather quaint and dated once you’ve got so used to its replacement. Redcar aside, however, WHSmith seems to have done a pretty good job of rolling its new logo out over the years – and that is important. 

Current WHSmith signage, on a typical store

If you’re a retailer going for a new visual identity, with all the brand values and sense of change that that espouses, it needs to be comprehensively and consistently applied – as House of Fraser has recently done. In contrast, retailers such as Matalan, Next and M&S have all been rather slow at applying their new visual identities to existing stores; the risk is that it creates and communicates a two-tier estate – those most important stores that are evidently worthy of rebranding; and those lower in the pecking order that seemingly aren’t so worth investing in.

John Lewis Bristol. Photograph by Mattbuck4950

Perhaps it’s a reflection of my status as a retail nerd that one of the first things I usually do on Friday mornings is check out the John Lewis Partnership’s ‘Weekly Figures’.

These weekly stats are strangely compelling in that – probably uniquely for a major UK retailer – John Lewis publishes a store-by-store breakdown for its eponymous department store chain. Hence, as well as finding out today that overall sales in the last week were up an impressive 5.3% on a year ago, we also get to see which stores have been doing particularly well over the last seven days (High Wycombe, up 15.1%), and which ones are looking a bit less healthy (Edinburgh, down 9.1% on a year ago).

Giving a picture of slightly longer-term trends, the comparisons given for the current half-year, rather than just the last week, tend to be more insightful. These remind us just how challenging John Lewis’s trading was between February and April – even after what is now 13 successive weeks of positive figures compared to 2008, Cambridge is still the only physical store to have enjoyed better sales (up 1.5%) over the current 24-week period than it did during the same stretch a year ago.

In contrast, it’s interesting that John Lewis’s worst performing store over the last 24 weeks has been John Lewis Bristol at the out-of-town Mall at Cribbs Causeway, where sales are down a whole 12.5% compared to last year. Bristol, of course, has seen some major retail changes over the past year, the new Cabot Circus development transforming the city centre with its opening of 120 stores – including a relocated House of Fraser and a new Harvey Nichols. One must guess that the new competition from Cabot Circus is, at least to some extent, accounting for John Lewis Bristol’s relatively poor performance.

The fortunes and associated stories of John Lewis Bristol are an interesting illustration of the cyclical nature of retail development. The store’s history goes back to 1980, when it took over the landmark building at Broadmead – adjoining what is now Cabot Circus – that had previously housed Lewis’s Ltd (no relation).

Fast forward to 1994 and John Lewis’s announcement that it was going to vacate that store – in favour of anchoring the shiny new out-of-town Cribbs Causeway mall – inevitably left future prospects for the city centre looking gloomy. After all, losing its John Lewis store is, possibly, any city centre’s worst nightmare.

Since John Lewis moved out in 1998, its old premises have had a rather chequered history. The independent Kingston-based department store chain, Bentalls, had already agreed, in 1995, to take over the building upon John Lewis’s departure – not, in hindsight, one of the better decisions in British retail history. After an expensive refurbishment, Bristol’s Bentalls store only lasted for two years, making an estimated £20m loss in the process – presumably thanks to shoppers flocking to John Lewis at Cribbs Causeway instead.

Though Bentalls managed to dispose of its Bristol store to House of Fraser in 2000, the ill-fated experience left the overall business weakened, paving the way for Newcastle-based Fenwick to snap up the remaining Bentalls stores in 2001 – perhaps something to talk about in more detail in a future blog post.

In its turn, House of Fraser announced in 2005 that it too would be moving out, this time to anchor Cabot Circus, with Primark stepping in to fill the void. With House of Fraser’s new store opening at the end of 2008, the old Lewis’s building will once again come back to life when Primark finally opens the doors next month to its biggest store outside London’s Oxford Street.

Given the property’s status as something of a barometer of Bristol’s changing retail fortunes, it’s a nice touch that the building is going to retain a visual reminder of its fascinating history. Given Primark’s seemingly unstoppable success though, it seems likely that its stay may be a little longer than some of its predecessors.

Thank you to Mattbuck4950 for the use of the photograph of John Lewis Bristol, which is © Copyright Mattbuck4950 and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.

Co-op Department Store, Great Yarmouth, prior to Vergo Retail's takeover. Photograph by Stephen McKay

In the last couple of weeks, one interesting news story that has been easy to miss is the takeover of the East of England Co-op’s department store business by Vergo Retail.

Vergo Retail, as you may be aware, is the Liverpool-based operation headed by David Thompson that, in 2007, rescued Lewis’s of Liverpool, Joplings of Sunderland and Robbs of Hexham from the brink of closure after Owen Owen, the previous owner, had gone into administration.

Reports suggest that Vergo Retail has been doing rather well since then. Certainly, the business has been performing well enough to snap up the non-food operation of the Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society^{[broken link removed]} (PSWCS) in February this year, including the Derrys department store in Plymouth and four additional Homemaker stores in Devon and Cornwall; and well enough to double the size of the business again, just a couple of weeks ago, with the acquisition of twelve East of England Co-op shops. This latest acquisition includes department stores in Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Clacton-on-Sea and Great Yarmouth, as well as six home stores in Felixstowe, Stowmarket, Clacton, Stanway, Dovercourt and Witham, and a standalone jewellery store in Colchester.

These developments are notable for various reasons, not least in being illustrative of the extent to which the UK’s consumer co-operative movement as a whole has recently been seeking to exit the non-food sector. A critical milestone in this respect was the Co-operative Group’s decision, in 2005, to close or sell its 36 department stores; here in the North East, this resulted in the closure of landmark stores in Gateshead, Newcastle, Chester-le-Street and elsewhere, while a few others – including Bishop Auckland, Blyth and (briefly) Berwick-upon-Tweed – became part of Anglia Regional Co-operative Society’s Westgate Department Stores business.

Co-op department store, Tamworth

The impact of the Co-operative Group’s exit from department stores has been significant. First, it has created challenges for those (dwindling number of) independent co-operative societies that remain – such as East of England and, in my parents’ home town, Tamworth Co-op – requiring them to source new suppliers and renogotiate with existing ones, while having to work increasingly hard to maintain gross margins. Second, it has meant that for any societies seeking to merge with the larger Co-operative Group – such as United Co-op in 2007, and PSWCS in 2009 – prior disposal or closure of their department stores has essentially been a prerequisite.

Vergo Retail’s recent moves are therefore significant in that they seem to offer unloved and unwanted Co-op department stores a lifeline - as non-Co-op department stores. In the east of England, there can be little doubt that many of the now-saved stores would have closed had Vergo not stepped in - yet they are all shops that have a loyal clientele; that perform an important function within their respective communities; and that, with some dynamic management and a little investment, could once again be highly successful. Indeed, as Vergo expands its empire, its ability to secure improved supplier terms – and offer better deals to customers – will be enhanced; the very opposite situation to that faced by the few remaining co-operatives with non-food interests.

What is interesting, from a historical point of view, is that I can think of no precedent where Co-op department stores have been acquired, as going concerns, by a non-co-operative retailer; rather, if you were to go back to the 1950s and earlier you would see the process happening in reverse, with independent department stores - such as Newcastle’s Henry A Murton’s in Grainger Street^{[broken link removed]} – being acquired by local co-ops.

Vergo Retail's established Robbs of Hexham store

Going forward, much will depend of course on whether Vergo can successfully turn around the mostly loss-making stores that it has acquired; however, the company’s apparent success in reinvigorating Lewis’s, Joplings and Robbs (no-one can forget the sad, plundered interior of Robbs in the days leading up to its aborted closure) bodes well. For me, though, the burning question – and one that I cannot find either asked or answered anywhere else – is how will Vergo rebrand its newly acquired stores in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex? After all, a store that is no longer a co-operative can barely be called a ‘Co-op Department Store’.

It will be interesting to see whether Vergo comes up with some locally-inspired names, or whether – in House of Fraser style – it seeks to bring some brand consistency to its growing portfolio. Lewis’s of Clacton, anyone?

Thank you to Stephen McKay for the use of the photograph of Great Yarmouth’s Co-op (now Vergo) department store, which is © Copyright Stephen McKay and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.