Isabel Macdonald outside her new store

Tamworth’s new John Lewis at Home opened its doors on Wednesday (12 October), eight months after I broke the news of its impending arrival.

The 42,000 sq ft shop at the edge-of-town Ventura Park is John Lewis’s sixth in the ‘at Home’ format, following the opening of stores in Poole, Croydon, Swindon (which I recently visited), Tunbridge Wells and Chester. Further John Lewis at Home shops are set to open in Ashford, Newbury and Chichester during 2012, while the retailer’s new Exeter store – originally announced as an ‘at Home’ shop – will, as I recently noted, be the first of a new ‘flexible’ department store format.

Cutting the ribbon at John Lewis Tamworth

While the ‘at Home’ stores focus on furniture, homewares, furnishing accessories, electricals and home technology, John Lewis’s strength as a multichannel retailer – highlighted in my recent Bdaily column – means that the full John Lewis range is available to Tamworth shoppers via ‘Click and Collect’. Products can be ordered online or instore by 7pm, and picked up from the store after 2pm the next day.

In a recent tweet, I suggested that John Lewis’s arrival in Tamworth was the biggest single retail event to happen in the town for decades – probably since the opening of the Ankerside shopping centre, in 1980, transformed the town centre’s retail landscape. The fact that there is now a store called ‘John Lewis Tamworth’ is remarkable enough in itself, but the 218 jobs that have been created by the £7m store – 200 of which are brand-new John Lewis Partners – also make it one of the biggest single retail investments that Tamworth has ever seen.

One of the Partners to have transferred from elsewhere is the new branch manager, Isabel Macdonald, whose career with the company goes back nine years – including seven years in the Reading store before her most recent stint as operations manager at Solihull. Hours after the store’s opening, Isabel took a few moments out to chat to me about getting the store ready for launch; the excitement of the opening morning; how John Lewis is seeking to establish itself as part of the Tamworth community; and how it is a “dream come true” to be branch manager of a store just twenty miles from where she was born and grew up.

Opening preparations

John Lewis at Home, Tamworth (3 Sep 2011)

John Lewis Tamworth’s transformation from a steel frame when I first visited in June to a fully-clad building in September and an operational store now is pretty impressive, and the efficiency of the process to train new Partners and stock the store is no less remarkable.

Isabel told me that her own work at Tamworth started seven weeks before opening, working with her team to ensure that the store had the “best-trained” Partners who would “give customers the service they would expect from John Lewis.” Meanwhile, she revealed that the process of filling the store with £3m of stock had taken just nine days to complete.

Three hours after the store opened at 9am, Isabel reported that cars had been “flooding in” to the 311-space car park, and that there had been 100 customers waiting in the queue for the doors to open – including one keen gentleman who had arrived at 6am. Early customer comments had been “lovely”, and the 80-seater instore café was also gaining positive feedback.

Shoppers enter John Lewis at Home Tamworth

Given Ventura Park’s reputation for traffic chaos, I was bound to ask Isabel for her view on how the roads had coped in those first few hours. While it was obviously early days, she suggested that the recent improvements to the road layout and traffic control – initiated as a direct result of John Lewis’s arrival and the nearby B&Q-anchored Cardinal Point development – seemed to be working. Clearly it will be something to keep an eye on, however; as Isabel noted, “We are keen to work with retailers and the council to make sure that Ventura Park is the most convenient place to shop for customers in the West Midlands.”

Range

A month ago, Retail Week reported that John Lewis was planning “tweaks” to the ‘at Home’ format in response to a performance that was “a little bit below what we expected”, and I raised this with Isabel.

While Retail Week suggested that John Lewis at Home stores will start to stock some lower-priced items – such as pictures, mirrors and rugs – Isabel was clear that the retailer’s longstanding ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ promise stands it in good stead: “What customers are saying is that they want to know they are getting value from John Lewis – that’s not necessarily being ‘cheap’, but offering value in terms of quality, price and service.” She gave the example of how the Tamworth store is offering a new, fully bespoke furnishing fabric service, where curtains can be ordered in custom sizes.

Birmingham

Not long after news emerged of Tamworth being the first John Lewis at Home in the Midlands, the Partnership announced, back in February, that a new full-line, 250,000 sq ft department store would open in Birmingham in 2014 – just 20 miles or 30 minutes’ drive away. With John Lewis already present in Solihull, Leicester and Nottingham, is this not a lot of stores in a relatively small area?

Seemingly not. Citing John Lewis’s investment in both online and shops, Isabel was clear that “the Tamworth and Birmingham shops have distinct catchments, and there is enough room for both to trade successfully”. While the Birmingham store is about having a presence in a major city centre, Tamworth – and the ‘at Home’ format generally – is “all about convenience”. The transport connections to Ventura Park seem to have been a big factor in choosing that location, with Isabel noting that the new Tamworth store will also serve towns such as Lichfield and Sutton Coldfield that have previously been outside a John Lewis catchment.

Town centre impact 

The latest CACI Retail Footprint map flagged Ventura Park as the UK’s tenth biggest retail park by expenditure; the arrival of John Lewis, with a new B&Q, Maplin and Next to follow, will surely propel it up the rankings. So, what does all this mean for Tamworth town centre – a location that has already rather struggled to define itself as major retailers like WHSmith and New Look have decamped to the edge of town?

Isabel was clear that John Lewis aims to work alongside the local retail community and to help “make Tamworth the best possible destination”. She observed that data following previous ‘at Home’ openings has demonstrated a “John Lewis effect for the whole area”, as shoppers take the opportunity to check out other attractions in those locations. The positive impact of the 200 new jobs will also filter through into the local economy, she argued, with many of the new Partners living in the Tamworth area.

Apart from the footfall and economic benefits, Isabel noted that her store is also working with three local charities – Tamworth Volunteer Centre, Rosie’s Helping Hands, and Bancroft Community Association – who took part in the opening-day ribbon-cutting ceremony and will each benefit from a donation from the retailer’s Community Matters scheme.

For all Tamworth town centre’s flaws – most notably its underwhelming market and lack of upmarket stores – there is, as I’ve observed before, much for visitors to enjoy. Visitors recently flocked to the Staffordshire Hoard exhibition at Tamworth Castle; the UltraSound Music Festival attracted a younger crowd to enjoy artists such as Tinie Tempah and The Wanted; and the town’s colourful floral displays this summer were, as always, among the best anywhere. The town centre also has some interesting and distinctive shops – notably the Irish fashion retaiiler, Dunnes; the independent Tamworth Co-op department store; and plenty of appealing independents.

John Lewis at Home is different to many of the other tenants at Ventura Park in that there was never any question of it being able to, or wanting to, open in Tamworth town centre. Ultimately, I would argue, it’s a format that works best on a retail park, and that was attracted to Tamworth specifically because of Ventura Park’s popularity and location.

However, if Isabel is right, and even a small proportion of John Lewis’s visitors check out what the town centre has to offer, the arrival in Tamworth of one of retail’s biggest names may indeed be cause for wider optimism about the town centre’s future.

Morrisons store

The Netto store in my old hometown of Tamworth is one of 16 sites that Morrisons is set to acquire following Asda’s purchase of the Netto UK business. The stores are among 47 that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has required Asda to sell to competitors, to avoid a lessening of consumer choice in those areas where Asda and Netto currently compete with one another.

With Asda already having a vast store at the nearby Ventura Retail Park, it was always likely that Tamworth’s Netto would be one of those that it would have to dispose of. However, with Sainsbury’s, Aldi, M&S, Iceland, Farmfoods and Tamworth Co-op also all currently represented in either the town centre or at Ventura, there was a fairly limited pool of potential purchasers.

Morrisons already has a Tamworth superstore in Marlborough Way, Wilnecote – a couple of miles from the centre of town – but its purchase of the Netto site should give a boost to the town centre’s retail offer by providing a much wider range of goods than Netto currently offers.

Gungate Precinct with Kwik Save store in the early 1990s

The purchase by Morrisons is the latest development in a fairly turbulent history for the Upper Gungate supermarket site, which was originally built as a Kwik Save in the 1990s. For a time, it was open concurrently with the previous, smaller Kwik Save in the Gungate Precinct – a unit that had housed Tesco and Victor Value back in the ’70s and ’80s. However, that Kwik Save store eventually closed, and was occupied by Pound Plus until the precinct’s demolition last year.

Following Somerfield’s disastrous 1998 purchase of Kwik Save, the Upper Gungate Kwik Save briefly became a Somerfield, before being turned back into a Kwik Save again. The store then closed down following Kwik Save’s collapse in 2007, standing empty for a year before being reopened as a Netto in August 2008.

Assuming that Asda’s acquisition of Netto receives final approval by the OFT, the handover of Morrisons’ stores is expected to commence on a phased basis in March, with conversion to the Morrisons format taking three months. On this basis, Morrisons should be trading from the site sometime in summer 2011.

Given Morrisons’ retail pedigree, there’s every chance that the store’s latest incarnation will be more long-lived than its increasingly fleeting predecessors.

George Street, Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

Take a look at the photograph above, captured in Tamworth’s main shopping street just before Christmas. Now, from a retailing point of view, see if you can work out what’s wrong with that scene.

To the right of the man in the photograph are some of Tamworth’s permanent shops – the lifeblood of the town centre. To the left of him are the backs of market stalls, facing into George Street. What’s outrageous, in my view, is the space (or lack of it) between the two – a couple of feet at best, and certainly only room to walk through in single file. If you have a pushchair or are in a wheelchair, forget it.

The result is that not only are the shops almost entirely obscured from the street – as you can see in the shot below – but that even if you know the shops are there, it’s a real challenge to navigate your way inside.

Market stalls in George Street, Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

A similar scene a few months earlier (19 Sep 2009)

Tamworth Market (24 Dec 2009)

Reportedly held since Saxon times, Tamworth’s market has a remarkable heritage, and is something that has potential to be a real asset to the town. What a shame then that on the 450th anniversary of its incorporation, by Queen Elizabeth in 1560, today’s market is such a sorry affair.

To have ramshackle ‘stalls’ in the middle of the town’s main shopping street, where traders display goods on a stack of cardboard boxes, is nothing short of a disgrace. Indeed, when the town has a sizeable open space – St Editha’s Square – that seems entirely capable of accommodating a large number of market stalls with some degree of orderliness, I never understand why they have to be shoehorned into George Street at all.

A near-deserted Gungate Precinct awaits demolition (22 Dec 2008)

For as long as I can remember, Tamworthians have grumbled about the lack of big-name or quality stores in the town centre – no M&S, Debenhams, Bhs, Primark, River Island or Next, for example (though a few of those names, plus many others, are now accommodated at the Ventura Park out-of-town retail development, about 15 minutes’ walk from the town centre).

The planned redevelopment of the Gungate Precinct by Henry Boot – a scheme known as Tamworth Junction – is set to provide Tamworth with its first major town centre shopping development in more than thirty years, with an opportunity to offer those missing retailers the size and quality of space that has been lacking to date.

However, if any property scouts had been visiting Tamworth the day that I was there, they would have come away with the impression of a town centre where the shops play second fiddle to the market stalls – hardly an incentive for any prospective retailer to invest in the town.

Tamworth town centre from the Castle mound (22 Dec 2008)

What is particularly frustrating is that Tamworth town centre has such a lot of potential as an attractive and distinctive retail destination. Tamworth Castle, St Editha’s Church and the Town Hall are historic buildings of importance and beauty, each one a dramatic landmark within the town centre.

St Editha's Church, Tamworth (22 Dec 2008)

Tamworth Town Hall (22 Dec 2008)

Lined with interesting old properties, Lower Gungate, Market Street and Little Church Lane are all streets of real character and charm, populated by many independent shops. It’s no coincidence that the absence of market stalls allows these streets to be properly appreciated.

Lower Gungate, Tamworth (22 Dec 2008)

Market Street, Tamworth, looking towards the Town Hall (22 Dec 2008)

The town having a Co-op department store – run by the still independent Tamworth Co-operative Society – is also something of a novelty these days, yet it has managed to evolve and maintain its position at the very heart of the town’s shopping experience at the same time as other regional Co-ops have exited non-food all together.

Co-op department store, Tamworth (19 Sep 2009)

The Ankerside Shopping Centre is also a significant asset, and has aged quite gracefully in the thirty-odd years since it opened. Though it lacks a well-known department store as an anchor, the presence of one of the few Dunnes Stores outside Ireland gives Ankerside something different to everywhere else. Equally, the relatively small number of empty units is an undoubted positive in the current economic climate – and nothing short of a miracle, given that the out-of-town Ventura Park features even more retail floorspace than the town centre.

Ankerside Shopping Centre, Tamworth (22 Dec 2008)

With so many assets, its frustrating that a visit to Tamworth town centre can still leave such a negative overall impression – an observation seemingly shared by John Harper at the Tamworth Herald newspaper, who questions why “the dreary, lacklustre place it is becoming” cannot be transformed  into “a thriving tourist centre”.

Certainly, comparing Tamworth to some of the other, more successful town centres that I’ve visited recently, I can’t help feeling that Tamworth’s powers-that-be need to have more confidence in what they’ve got, and in what they could have.

If nothing else, the place deserves so much better than a bloke in the street selling random stuff out of a box.