Former Woolworths, Newton Aycliffe (1 Mar 2011)

With a dwindling number of empty Woolworths stores remaining in the North East, it doesn’t take too long to check out whether anything’s happening on the ground.

I revisited Wallsend’s ex-Woolies back in November, closely followed by Hartlepool and Middlesbrough. This left just Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee and Newcastle to take a look at over the last couple of days, with my visits confirming that all three are indeed still vacant and without any signs of activity.

Former Woolworths, Clayton Street, Newcastle (2 Mar 2011)

Former Woolworths, Peterlee (1 Mar 2011)

Former Woolworths, Newton Aycliffe (1 Mar 2011)

I also called into Seaham – there too, the ex-Woolies building remains empty, though as a result of Ethel Austin’s collapse rather than Woolworths’. As I’ve blogged before, the property hasn’t housed a Woolworths store for a quarter of a century, though the architecture conveys the shop’s Woolies origins much more than its Newton Aycliffe or Peterlee counterparts.

Former Woolworths and Ethel Austin, Seaham (1 Mar 2011)

The fortunes of Seaham town centre as a whole seemed even more polarised than on my previous visit. The Asda-anchored Byron Place mall on the seafront appeared to be thriving, with a good number of shoppers and 100% occupancy of its units.

In contrast, the top end of Church Street – the main pedestrian thoroughfare, and where the ex-Ethel Austin is located – was eerily quiet at 5pm, with just a few shoppers venturing into the tatty-looking and partly-shuttered Somerfield store. Presumably a Co-operative Food makeover will be forthcoming soon, providing a smarter face to the street and a welcome confidence boost for that end of town.

Somerfield, Seaham (1 Mar 2011)

While new occupants of ex-Woolies stores prove elusive for a handful of North East towns, two other places have had a welcome fillip since I last visited.

Back in September 2009, the former Woolworths in Houghton-le-Spring, near Sunderland, was a pretty depressing sight (below) with its boarded-up windows and shuttered frontage.

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

Happily, the premises were taken over by Store Twenty One almost a year ago, and look a whole lot better now than they did on my previous visit.

Former Woolworths (now Store Twenty One), Houghton-le-Spring (1 Mar 2011)

I’d never visited a Store Twenty One branch prior to the company taking over the ex-Woolies sites in Stanley and Jarrow, but I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve seen there and at Houghton-le-Spring. In all three cases, the interiors have been completely transformed, with attractively presented merchandise, good quality signage and an overall fresh and modern look.

It’s just a pity that the company website’s “cheap clothes” tagline still rather undermines its impressive efforts instore. Someone needs to remind owners Grabal Alok that retailers don’t sell “cheap clothes” any more – only “value fashions”.

Another ex-Woolies that’s had a fashion makeover since I last visited is the branch at 12-18 Northgate in Darlington, where work on site was underway back in March last year (below).

Former Woolworths, Darlington (12 March 2010)

Again, the bulk of the property has been transformed, with Next creating a new store at numbers 12-16 that is bright, appealing, and a really positive addition to the street since its opening last July.

Former Woolworths (now Next), Darlington (1 March 2011)

Next door, a portion of the old Woolies – the Grade II-listed number 18 – remains vacant. However, carving it off from the rest of the store does make architectural sense, and allows the merits of its attractive façade to be better appreciated.

Former Woolworths at 18 Northgate, Darlington (1 Mar 2011)

Of course, the flipside of Next’s new store is that the two former Next sites on Northgate have been vacated, both of which are currently empty. The lease of the vacated 1,675 sq ft unit at 59-63 Northgate is currently being advertised by agent Molyneux Rose [broken link removed], while the nearby premises at 21-23 Northgate are empty after hosting a temporary ‘X Factor Factory Clearance’ store.

Former Next at 59-63 Northgate, Darlington (1 Mar 2011)

Former Next at 21-23 Northgate, Darlington (1 Mar 2011)

While temporary and pop-up shops have their place on the high street, there must surely be a tackiness threshold above which an empty shop is preferable – particularly when Simon Cowell’s intellectual property is seemingly being so blatantly infringed.

All this shuffling around in Darlington’s Northgate highlights the need to take any statistics on changing shop vacancy rates with a heavy pinch of salt. Taking the three former Woolies and Next units together, two were occupied and one vacant when I visited Darlington a year ago. Now, however, one is occupied, two are empty, and another vacant unit – at 18 Northgate – has been created.

Just looking at the numbers, without any understanding of the context, this reads like a retrograde step in Darlington’s retail fortunes, with three out of the four shops now being empty where previously it was only one of the three. However, most observers would surely see Next’s investment in Darlington as a positive sign for the town – even if this has resulted in some (hopefully) short-term voids.

Scary numbers might make garish headlines, but they’re no substitute for actually understanding the places that you’re writing about.

Former Woolworths (now Boots), Crook (6 Nov 2010)

Imagine a small town whose Woolworths opened in the 1930s, closed in the 1970s, and is now occupied by Boots.

A town where, even all those years later, the building is instantly recognisable as a former Woolies.

A place where, in 2010, discount retailer The Original Factory Shop has to some extent assumed Woolies’ place as a variety store at the heart of the town.

The Original Factory Shop, Crook (6 Nov 2010)

No, it’s not a rerun of my earlier blog post about the former Woolworths in Horley, Surrey, but the small County Durham town of Crook – along with Seaham, one of two urban centres in the county that had lost its Woolies many years before the retailer collapsed.

Crook Market Place, 1904. Image courtesy of C&DLHS

Between the 1830s and the end of the 19th century, the village of Crook blossomed into a town, its population growing from 200 to more than 12,000 on the back of the coal mining industry. The area around the Market Place grew into an important shopping centre for the town, with the imposing premises of the Crook Industrial Co-operative Society opening in North Terrace in 1876 – dominating the right-hand half of the early 20th century photograph below, but now demolished, and replaced by the town’s council offices.

Pre-1910 view of Crook Market Place. Image courtesy of C&DLHS

Comparison of the photographs above and below shows that Crook’s purpose-built Woolworths store was slotted in between the existing buildings, replacing what is shown in the earlier shot as the two-storey premises of Isaac Wilson.

Post-Woolies view of Crook Market Place. Image courtesy of C&DLHS

Edward Lloyd’s 1916 account of the History of the Crook and Neighbourhood Co-operative Corn Mill, Flour & Provision Society Limited – available in a full electronic version at the Open Library – reveals Isaac Wilson to be a ‘druggist’ which, as Tas remarked in a previous comment, “makes Boots’ [current] use of the site quite appropriate.”

Unsure of when exactly Woolworths in Crook had opened, I turned to the Crook & District Local History Society, to see if anyone local could shed some light on the subject. The familar architecture of Crook’s Woolies store, and the fact that Crook was unlikely to have been a particularly early Woolies opening, had suggested to me the early 1930s, an assessment that proved correct.

How the store looks today (6 Nov 2010)

Usefully, the C&DLHS has recently published a new 64-page book about Crook’s history, in which one of the ‘did you know?’ facts relates to the opening of the town’s Woolies store. It appears that the shop opened – for viewing only – on 1 December 1933, before officially opening the following day to the accompaniment of “an élite band playing melodies.”

This could well mean that the Crook branch was Woolies store #529, as that’s the only store opened between late 1933 (520 Alloa) and mid 1934 (536 Fareham) for which I have a number but no name. 

1950s postcard of Crook Market Place

Go forward to the 1950s, and the Woolies store is clearly visible, with its awning, on the left-hand side of the postcard above. Beyond it, the tall buildings of the Co-op store still dominate the town’s Market Place.

By the end of the 1960s, however, Crook was experiencing significant changes, with the mines all closed, the railway gone, and its population declining. Against this backdrop, and with the much larger Bishop Auckland Woolworths just six miles away, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Crook’s Woolies was one of the first in the North East to be closed.

However, compared to the detail that we know of the store’s opening, pinning down exactly when it closed is more challenging. It seems pretty certain that it was the 1970s – this is the C&DLHS’s best guess (with one member suggesting – but not certain – that it was 1972), and it confirms the account of Lorna Robson in Derek Phillips’ enjoyable The Wonder of Woolies book. Recalling her memories of working in the Crook store, she writes that “I left in 1968 and I believe the store closed in the 1970s.”

I understand that the store became Boots straight after Woolworths vacated it, with the chemist moving from its existing premises elsewhere in the town. So working out when Boots opened on that site could be an alternative way of narrowing down the date when Woolies closed. [UPDATE, 5 January 2011: So it proved! Brenda Smith from C&DLHS tells me that she has "finally found out that Crook Woolworths closed in 1973. This is reliable info - came from someone who worked for Boots at the time."]

With previous Woolies blog posts, Soult’s Retail View readers have done a fine job of filling in the knowledge gaps. Can you rise to the challenge again this time?

Many thanks to Crook & District Local History Society – and particularly to Brenda Smith and Harry Brook – for letting me use its historic photographs of Crook Market Place, and for providing the answer to the question of when the town’s Woolies store opened.

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.^{[broken link removed]} 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^{[broken link removed]} 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, Seaham (2 April 2010)

Recent comments on this blog about the former Woolworths in Church Street, Seaham have given me the nudge that I required, having taken some photos of the store back in April but not yet got round to writing about it.

Just like the Woolworths in Benwell and Byker, the Seaham shop is one that had bitten the dust long before the company’s administration in 2008. Featuring the five bays and central pediment that characterises Woolies stores from the 1920s and 30s, Seamaster suggests that the store closed down in the mid-1980s - a period when there were quite a few store closures following the UK business’s split from its American parent.

Former Woolworths, Seaham (2 April 2010)

In its scale and grandeur, the former Woolworths is undoubtedly one of the finest shop buildings in Seaham. This makes it a particular shame that the present shopfront is so dismal, disconnected architecturally from the upper half of the building, and having complete disregard for the property’s symmetry. It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when old photographs suggest that the building’s original and harmonious shopfront was still in place.

If its past as a Woolies is the building’s first story, then its second and more recent story relates to it being a branch of the clothing retailer Ethel Austin. When I visited in April, however, the Ethel Austin store had itself closed down, one of the first 114 stores to be shuttered following the Liverpool-based firm’s collapse – yet again – into administration.

Though too late for Seaham, a rump of 90 stores were rescued in April, following their purchase by the firm’s previous owner,  Elaine McPherson. However, the longstanding Ethel Austin brand looks set to disappear, with the stores remodelled into a new fashion and homewares chain called Life & Style, alongside the head office for the business moving from its historic base of Liverpool to Altrincham.

Time will tell whether Life & Style can succeed where Ethel Austin could not - or whether, as one commentator has observed, it is “just Ethel Austin with a different name”.  On balance though, it probably is the right decision – albeit a sad one – to ditch a 76-year-old brand that was starting to become so associated with failure. For now, however, the Ethel Austin name will no doubt live on in the fascias of closed-up stores such as the one in Seaham.

Byron Place shopping centre, Seaham (11 Sep 2009)

With the appealing (and almost fully let) Byron Place mall having shifted Seaham’s retail centre of gravity to the bottom end of Church Street since its opening in 2007, the prospect of the town’s old Woolies securing a new tenant anytime soon does seem uncertain.

Exterior of Byron Place mall, Seaham (11 Sep 2009)

However, it would be a neat conclusion to the story if one of the successor chains to Woolworths – such as Alworths – were to bring a variety store offer back to Seaham’s old Woolies building after an absence of a quarter of a century. Indeed, with Alworths opening stores in Scotland later this month, there must now be a reasonable chance of seeing Alworths stores in the North East before too long.

Whoever eventually moves in to Seaham’s former Woolworths, let’s hope that they also take the opportunity to do something about the dispiriting shopfront, allowing the property to once again be an object of beauty and pride on the high street.

Former Linthorpe Road Woolworths, Middlesbrough

Last week’s blog post about the long-closed former Woolworths in Benwell seems to have opened the floodgates to lots of comments and insights about other nearly-forgotten Woolies in the North East – many thanks indeed for all your contributions!

While Seamaster reminisced about the old Woolies in Seaham – closed in the 1980s – TAS was able to confirm that the long-departed store in Crook was, indeed, in the building that now houses Boots. Meanwhile, Peter shared his memories of buying film brochures from the former Byker Woolies in Shields Road (another ’80s casualty), while John from Gateshead alerted me, via Twitter, to a former Woolworths in Felling that I never knew existed – another one to add to the visiting list!

Former Woolworths (now Decorflair), Shields Road, Byker

Given this present flurry of archive delving, I figured it might be a good moment to recap the known locations of old Woolworths stores in the North East. First, here are the 33 Woolworths that kept going until the bitter end, and only closed down in December 2008 and January 2009 following Woolworths’ administration:

• Alnwick (#822)
• Ashington (#229)
• Barnard Castle (#534)
• Berwick-upon-Tweed (#232)
• Billingham (#820)
• Bishop Auckland (#116)
• Blyth (#544)
• Byker (Newcastle Shopping Park) (#1256)
• Chester-le-Street (#267)
• Consett (#388)
• Darlington (#28)
• Durham (#321)
• Gateshead (#154)
• Gosforth (#716)
• Hartlepool (#322)
• Hexham (#931)
• Houghton-le-Spring (#488)
• Jarrow (#434)
• MetroCentre (#1238)
• Middlesbrough (#1200)
• Morpeth (#439)
• Newcastle upon Tyne (Clayton Street) (#340)
• Newton Aycliffe (#1007)
• North Shields (#426)
• Peterlee (#987)
• Redcar (#275)
• South Shields (#104)
• Spennymoor (#278)
• Stanley (#873)
• Stockton-on-Tees (Castlegate) (#336)
• Stockton-on-Tees (Portrack Lane) (#1232)
• Wallsend (#351)
• Whitley Bay (#277)

Photographs and links to previous blog posts about those stores are given on the ‘Old Woolies’ page.

Next, these are the 16 19 North East stores, that I know of, that had closed down prior to Woolworths’ administration. As far as I’m aware, these are all stores that closed down years ago (i.e. the 1980s or earlier), with the exception of the Middlesbrough Music & Video shop (which reportedly shut in the early 1990s), and of course the large Sunderland store that only bit the dust in 2004:

• Benwell (#905)
• Blaydon
• Byker (63 Shields Road) [EDIT: Store # (276) sourced, 29 Oct 2010] 
• Crook
• Felling
• Killingworth (Woolco)
• Linthorpe Village
• Longbenton [EDIT: Added to list, 21 Jun 2010]
• Middlesbrough (Linthorpe Road) (#8)
• Middlesbrough (Music & Video, Hillstreet)
• New Washington (#1014) [EDIT: Added to list, 3 Jun 2010]
• Newcastle upon Tyne (Northumberland Street) (#27)
• North Kenton [EDIT: Added to list, 28 Jul 2010]
• Pennywell, Sunderland (#817)
• Seaham
• Stockton-on-Tees (High Street)
• Sunderland (Fawcett Street) (#144)
• Thornaby (Woolco)
• Washington Galleries (Woolco) (#2007)

Former Woolworths (now Primark), Sunderland

Former Woolworths, Benwell

In both the lists above, I’ve included the store numbers in brackets where I have them. Within the Woolworths business, these numbers provided each store with a unique identifier, and are repeatedly used in old editions of The New Bond, when referring to particular branches. They were still in use right until the end, however, as highlighted in this useful 2007 PDF.

Stores seem to have kept the same number throughout their lifetimes – South Shields, for example, is referred to as store number 104 in the 2007 list, just as it was in an issue of The New Bond from fifty years earlier.

As far as I am aware, the store numbers also correspond to the order in which those shops were opened – hence the original UK Woolworths in Liverpool being #1; new stores mentioned in the February 1956 edition of The New Bond ranging from #913 (Kingsbridge) to #921 (Warminster); and the most recent Big W sites (such as Byker) having store numbers in the 1200s.

Where a store was rebuilt or relocated – Stockton-on-Tees’ #336, for example – it seems to have kept its original number; however, a new store opening up in a town that had had a Woolworths in the past (such as Middlesbrough), seems to have been allocated a new number (hence the modern Hillstreet branch being #1200, rather than taking over the former #8).

I’d be interested to know if there’s a complete list of store numbers these out there; I certainly haven’t come across one as yet, though it is possible to find the number for many stores by searching or browsing at Woolworths Reunited and 100thBirthday.co.uk.

Equally, if you know of any old Woolies in the North East that are missing from the list above, please add a comment below. I very much doubt that the list is comprehensive, and suspect that there may well be further examples, similar to Stockton, where an earlier store was replaced by a new one elsewhere in the same town.

Ethel Austin, Bishop Auckland

Reports that value fashion retailer Ethel Austin and its sister homewares business, Au Naturale, are poised to enter administration – less than two years after both chains were rescued from previous administrations - is sad and disappointing news, as well as being quite surprising in its timing. 

True, there has been talk of an impending refinancing deal for a week or two, following suppliers’ alleged complaints about not having received payments that were due before Christmas. However, the retailer had reportedly “vehemently denied that it was in trouble”, and has recently been opening stores at quite a pace – 30 to 40 in the last few months, according to the Independent. 

Indeed, as recently as last week Ethel Austin was announcing new store openings, its planned move into the former Woolworths premises in Carmarthen following its acquisition of more than 20 other Woolies sites nationwide over the last twelve months, such as Huddersfield, Fishponds in Bristol, Stone in Staffordshire, and Leven in Fife. 

Ethel Austin store, Byker

I can’t recall ever entering an Ethel Austin store, so it’s difficult for me to comment on what might have gone wrong, though it’s fair to say that many of the more established shops that I have spotted – in places such as Byker or Seaham – haven’t occupied great locations. I’ve always quite liked Au Naturale though, and was disappointed to hear only this week that its Washington Galleries store was closing down. Its stock is largely cheap and cheerful, but it’s always been a good place to go for reasonably priced, decent quality home accessories such as cushions, baskets, vases and coasters. 

Hopefully, whatever fate awaits Ethel Austin and Au Naturale, the future of as many stores and jobs as possible can be secured. However, as with childrenswear retailer Adams – currently in administration for the third time in three years – you do have to question how far a business that has repeatedly collapsed into administration is really worth saving. It suggests, surely, that something is fundamentally awry with the business model or brand. 

Indeed, think about those retailers that have been rescued from administration in recent years, and it’s much easier to bring to mind those that have later collapsed again – such as MK One, MFI and, only this week, jewellery retailer Diamonds & Pearls – than it is to think of any chain that has truly gone on to thrive. Little wonder, perhaps, when retailers are so often bought out of administration – in a pre-pack or otherwise – by the same individuals who took them into administration in the first place.