Former Woolworths (now Heron Foods), New Washington (Concord) (17 Jun 2010)

Back in February, I blogged about the former Woolworths store in Sunderland’s Fawcett Street, which closed in 2004 following its acquisition by Primark.

At the time, I noted the curious lack of Woolies stores left on Wearside at the point of the retailer’s 2008 administration, with Houghton-le-Spring (#448) the last one remaining in the Sunderland area. As I’ve dug around more, however, it’s become clear that there are even more old Woolies on Wearside than I thought, with long-closed stores at New Washington (#1014), Seaham and Pennywell (#817), as well as the fairly short-lived Woolco (#2007) at Washington Galleries.

I’m imagining that the former Pennywell store is no more – perhaps demolished as part of the redevelopment of the estate’s shopping centre? – but I’d be curious to know when the store closed, where it was, and any memories of shopping or working there. I’ve got the store number – #817 – from an old edition of The New Bond, which would suggest that it opened in 1953.

Over to New Washington though, and I was alerted to the existence of that store by a photo, from 1959, on the Woolies nostalgia site, 100thBirthday.co.uk, which I found when hunting out information on Washington’s Woolco. According to the site, the New Washington store was a fairly late addition to the Woolies estate, opening as a self-service store in March 1959 in the then-new Arndale Centre. Apparently, however, business suffered once the enormous Washington Galleries Woolco opened down the road in 1970, eventually leading to the store’s closure in 1984.

'Arndale House' signage at Concord's Arndale Centre (17 Jun 2010)

It’s conceivable that the New Washington shop may have survived if it had only hung around a little longer, given that the Woolco estate was itself disposed of shortly afterwards – 100thBirthday.co.uk says 1985, Richard Hawkins 1986 and the Sunderland Echo 1988. Perhaps someone can advise on when the correct date actually was?

Naturally, I was curious to track down the New Washington Woolies and, indeed, to see whether the building was even still there. The first hurdle was working out where exactly New Washington was, given that it was a name I’d never heard used before. However, a little bit more digging – including references to ‘New Washington Post Office’ – helped me pinpoint the location as what is known today as Concord, close to the busy Concord bus station. Apparently, New Washington – now Concord - was the commercial centre of Washington new town prior to the building of the Galleries in the 1970s.

Former Woolworths (now Heron Foods), New Washington (Concord) (17 Jun 2010)

Happily, I found that the Arndale Centre is still intact, and that the former Woolworths property is still completely recognisable as the store featured in 100thBirthday.co.uk’s shot from more than fifty years ago. In fact, the whole parade is still rather handsome, with the façade of the former Woolworths unit retaining what looks to be its original green mosaic tiling – quite a delightful architectural feature. It’s just a shame that the first floor windows – open in the 1959 shot – have subsequently been blocked up.

Fittingly, however, the unit is now a Heron Foods, a status shared with quite a number of those Woolies that only closed down eighteen months ago.

Meanwhile, over at Washington Galleries, the main architectural clues to the former status of Woolco – now Asda – are its vast size, and the fact that the interior of the building still has something of the feel of a 1970s structure. At the time, of course, shops of that size – while common today – would still have been few and far between, in the days before Asda Supercentres and Tesco Extras had been thought of. Against this backdrop, it’s easy to imagine how exciting and impressive the enormous Woolco must have seemed when it opened forty years ago.

1970s view of Washington's Woolco

Former Woolco (now Asda) at Washington Galleries (17 June 2010)

Shots of the Washington Woolco seem quite hard to come by, but I’m grateful to Peter for finding the 1970s photograph above in a little book called The Visit of President Carter and Prime Minister Callaghan to Washington New Town, 6th May 1977.

As with the New Washington store, it’s remarkable how similar the building looks now to how it did decades ago – compare the colonnaded entrance, for example. Other than the signage, and the models of cars in the car park, little else has really changed.

While Washington’s two very different Woolies are both long gone, a little bit of retail history is certainly still readable in the buildings that used to house them.

Former Woolworths (now Primark), Sunderland (21 Nov 2009)

In an earlier post, I talked about some of the large, city centre Woolworths stores – such as the branches on Newcastle’s Northumberland Street and Sheffield’s Haymarket – that were closed down in the 1980s as the retailer trimmed its ranges and focused on generally smaller shops.  

However, one flagship Woolies that lasted rather longer than most is the one in Sunderland’s Fawcett Street, which opened in 1923 and only closed in 2004, after the company received an offer for the lease, from Primark, that it reportedly “could not refuse”.

The closure of that store meant that the only Woolworths left within Sunderland’s boundaries was the one at Houghton-le-Spring, which shut down along with all the others following Woolies’ administration at the end of 2008.

Former Woolworths in Houghton-le-Spring (11 Sep 2009)

Before that, there apparently used to be a Woolworths store, of sorts, at Washington Galleries. This closed in 1988, but was a Woolco shop – a Woolworths-owned out-of-town, discount department store and supermarket – rather than a Woolies proper.

While I’m old enough to remember the Woolco name, I can’t recall ever going to one of the stores. From what I can gather, there were only ever 14 UK Woolcos opened – many in New Towns, and including two other North East stores in Killingworth and Thornaby – all of which were sold off to Dee Corporation (Gateway) or Asda by 1988.

I understand that Asda stores still occupy the former Woolco sites at both Washington and Thornaby, while Killingworth’s was eventually demolished and replaced by the Killingworth Shopping Centre. Photos of old UK Woolcos (as opposed to the US chain) seem quite hard to come by – I’d be delighted to post some on this blog if anyone has any that they would care to share!

Next, Northumberland Street, Newcastle (5 Feb 2010)

Following the apparent confirmation of earlier rumours about Next planning to open a new store in Newcastle’s Eldon Square shopping centre next year, it seems timely to take a look at the retailer’s current Northumberland Street premises, shown above.

It’s quite a handsome building when you stand back and look at it – particularly in comparison to the brutish, blank, brown brick facades of the Primark (formerly C&A) and Bhs building next door. Imagine then how things might look if a building in the style of Next’s premises wrapped all the way round the corner into Northumberland Road, in place of the existing Bhs/Primark block… something like the view below, perhaps?

Old postcard of Bhs site, Northumberland Street, Newcastle

Perhaps I should have known already, but before getting a copy of the fascinating new Newcastle Through Time book for Christmas, I hadn’t a clue that today’s Next building is a retained fragment of the building above - the remainder of which was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for more modern premises for the then ‘British Home Stores’ and C&A. I’m none the wiser, however, about which retailer was occupying the Next site at that time, or indeed what the reason was for retaining those three last bays. Perhaps someone out there can shed some light on the matter?

The same view today

One thing I do know is that the story has a neat, if slightly tenuous, link to a building mentioned briefly in one of my first blog posts – Murton House, in Grainger Street. Having housed the Henry A Murton department store from about 1910 until its takeover by the Co-op in 1957, the Co-op made substantial changes to the interior in the 1960s, before moving out of the premises in 1971. Conveniently, C&A was able to take the property over after only a short period of vacancy, occupying the building until 1973 while its regular premises in Northumberland Street were demolished and rebuilt.

Similarly, British Home Stores apparently moved to Pilgrim Street during the redevelopment of the site – again, answers on a postcard if you have any information on where exactly that was.

Existing Topshop, Newcastle

Back in the present, we do now know a little more, courtesy of The Journal, about the proposed new Next store in Eldon Square. It will:

• Reportedly be “one of the largest branches of Next in the country”
• Supposedly replace, rather than supplement, Next’s existing Northumberland Street store (handily freeing up a prominent unit for somebody else – perhaps Zara?)
• Take over a small amount of space occupied by Eldon Leisure in order to create space for a “flagship store”.

The fact that Next will be nibbling into Eldon Leisure seems to reinforce the view that its intended location must be the current Arcadia Group space, presumably incorporating three floors - the street and mall levels (current Topshop), and the floor accessed by escalators from the mall that currently houses Topman (and, if I understand correctly, the adjacent bit of Eldon Leisure).

This space equates to the whole of the brown-brick block shown in the photo above. However, with a reported £8m redevelopment budget, it has to be hoped that something creative can be done to get rid of those blank and lifeless façades – either by building out into the open space between it and the new St Andrew’s Way (the redbrick section to the right of the shot), or by punching some more openings into what is currently there.

Hollister's website, including the '1922' device

I can’t claim to know much about Abercrombie & Fitch’s sister brand, Hollister, and if I did, I suspect it’s somewhere that might be outside of both my price and age brackets. To be fair though, Hollister’s presence in the UK is pretty new – the first store, at Brent Cross, opened only last year – with Meadowhall and the Trafford Centre currently its most northerly outposts.

Despite my limited knowledge of the retailer, I was still quite interested to read the BBC’s article today about what it describes as Hollister’s ‘fictitious’ branding. Essentially, the BBC has ‘uncovered’ that there is no historical foundation for the use of the ’1922′ device on Hollister’s logos and labels, and that the whole ‘story’ behind the business – actually founded in 2000 – is made up.

In reality, the BBC’s article is not quite the scoop that it first appears, given that the Wikipedia article about Hollister has openly referred to the business’s “fictional background story” – downloadable in full from the A&F website – since at least January this year. Given that it’s no secret, it would surely have been better for Hollister’s press people to point this out to the BBC themselves, moulding the story into some positive PR for the brand, rather than giving a silly response – “Due to our policies regarding press, we choose not to provide any comment on your questions” – that simply appears to add substance to the BBC’s implied criticism.

Nevertheless, the debate about whether all this matters is still an interesting one. The question, essentially, is this – does anybody really care about the authenticity of Hollister’s history as long as they like the clothes and can relate to the brand’s “harmony of romance, beauty, adventure and today”?

It’s certainly true that retailers have long created brands that evoke the American dream – after all, with their respective ‘Cedarwood State’, ‘Atlantic Bay’ and ‘Blue Harbour’ sub-brands, even Primark, Bhs and M&S are at it.

I do wonder, however, if founding an entire retailer’s brand on a made-up story is maybe an evocation too far.

Your comments, as always, are welcomed…

Newcastle's Zavvi store in happier times. Photograph by Mankind 2k

When I remarked a couple of weeks ago that Newcastle’s “Monument Mall would surely welcome the arrival of a strong anchor store” following the closure of Zavvi, a potential new branch of Barclays Bank was not exactly what I had envisaged.

Today’s Journal reports that “some members of Newcastle’s commercial property community have expressed dismay at the potential move”, and no wonder – the idea of the prime Northumberland Street site being lost to retail use is a crazy one.

Over the years, The Journal’s commercial property section has repeatedly cited the problem of big-name retailers who want to move to Newcastle not being able to find units of the size and quality that they require. This, indeed, has also been mentioned as the logic behind Eldon Square’s current redevelopment, where two-storey, modern units are being created. Against this backdrop, it certainly seems bizarre to take a 17,000 sq ft, three-storey unit out of the city’s retail equation.

It’s hard too to see how filling one of Monument Mall’s most prominent units with a bank will do very much to invigorate the rest of the mall. One of Zavvi’s strengths was having entrances/exits on all three shopping levels of Monument Mall, as well as to Northumberland Street, helping shoppers permeate throughout. It would seem unlikely, however, that Barclays would wish to keep so many entrances, or indeed even make public use of all three floors.

Even Northumberland Street – though in reasonably fine fettle, anchored as it is by the stalwarts of Fenwick, M&S, Bhs, Primark, Next and H&M – would surely benefit from something different to the banks, phone shops and coffee shops that have mushroomed along its length in recent years.

A separate issue is what would happen to Barclays’ existing city centre branches assuming, as The Journal notes, that any planning application to change the old Zavvi’s use from A1 (retailing) to A2 (financial services) was successful (something that is not guaranteed). While other banks have scaled back their city centre presence in recent years, Barclays still has four branches in relatively close proximity to each other – at the top end of Northumberland Street; on the corner of Percy Street and Gallowgate; in Grainger Street, next to Central Arcade; and the rebranded Woolwich opposite the old Odeon in Pilgrim Street (I don’t think I’ve missed any others). It seems highly unlikely that all of these would be retained in addition to the proposed new branch, but none are really in top-notch retail locations – perhaps part of the rationale for Barclays seeking a more central site.

If this were the case, Barclays’ move would mirror that of HSBC a few years ago, where several Newcastle city centre branches were closed and their operations consolidated into a new Grey Street flagship. The difference, though, is that HSBC’s move didn’t result in the loss of an existing retail site, given that the premises it moved into had previously housed branches of Pizza Hut and TSB.

As always, your thoughts and reactions are welcome. Most obviously, what retail name would you like to see moving into Newcastle’s old Zavvi store? Or, perhaps, are you excited at the prospect of a new shiny branch of Barclays?

Update: That’s neat! Impressed that Google has not only picked up this blog post within an hour of me publishing it, but that it shows up higher in the search results for ‘zavvi barclays newcastle’ than the Journal article that prompted it :)

Thank you to Mankind 2k for the use of his photograph of Newcastle’s old Zavvi store, which is © Copyright Mankind 2k and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

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.