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.

John Lewis fascia

As the vast Westfield Stratford City opens its doors today, it’s little wonder that most of Twitter’s retail commentators seem to have decamped to east London. With 300 stores (though not yet all open) and a floor area of 1.9m sq ft (177,000 sqm), the opening of “Europe’s largest urban shopping centre” would be a noteworthy occasion at any time.

As it is, the mall is the only major shopping centre to open in the UK this year. While most major new retail developments, such as Trinity Leeds or Sheffield’s Sevenstone, have been delayed as a result of the economic downturn, Westfield Stratford City has been driven by its unique status as the gateway to London’s Olympic Park.

The site intended for Sheffield's new John Lewis (18 Aug 2011)

For John Lewis, whose 260,000 sq ft store (with 155,000 sq ft of selling space) anchors Westfield Stratford City, this stalling of new shopping centre developments has put something of a brake on its plans for new full-line department stores. Stratford City is the first one to open since Cardiff’s two years ago, while there’s unlikely to be another one before Birmingham opens in 2014. New stores that should have been opening this year – such as those in Sheffield and Portsmouth – are still several years off, assuming they happen at all.

Sheffield's existing John Lewis in Barker's Pool (18 Aug 2011)

John Lewis’s response to the development hold-ups has been to introduce new, smaller formats that will work in a wider range of locations – such as the ‘At Home’ concept that I blogged about previously – as well as continuing to invest in upgrading its existing store estate. While in the Midlands and South over the last few weeks, I was able to take a look at some of what John Lewis is up to.

John Lewis Reading's Broad Street frontage (19 Aug 2011)

Down in Berkshire, John Lewis Reading is one of the chain’s longest established stores, and is currently benefiting from a £19m makeover. Occupying a prime spot in Broad Street, the town’s main shopping thoroughfare, the store was extended in 1985 but traces its origins, as Heelas, back to 1855. The John Lewis Partnership acquired the shop in 1953, though the John Lewis fascia was only adopted in 2001.

When I visited last month, work on the second phase of the comprehensive two-stage revamp was well underway. New features of the store include a recently opened new-concept technology department, where modern interior finishes and computers on long tables create a more hands-on, Apple Store-style experience than has usually been the case at John Lewis.

John Lewis at Home, Swindon (11 Sep 2011)

Forty miles or so down the M4, the £7m John Lewis at Home in Swindon represents a relatively quick and cheap way for the retailer to circumvent development delays, and to plug the gap in coverage between its existing department stores in Reading and Bristol.

At first glance, the store’s location on the slightly dowdy Mannington Retail Park – close to an existing Carpetright, Allied Carpets and a closed-down Matalan Clearance shop – doesn’t seem especially promising, and the smaller lettable units (currently empty) that form part of the new John Lewis block bring to mind the never-occupied stores adjoining Gateshead’s ill-fated M&S Lifestore/ILVA.

Fortunately, if the busyness of the store last Sunday afternoon is anything to go by, Swindon’s John Lewis should enjoy a much more positive future. At 39,000 sq ft of selling space, the store is barely a quarter of the size of the Stratford City shop, but its range of furniture, homewares, electricals and technology, spread over two floors, seemed to compare favourably with that offered by my local JL department store in Newcastle. Prominent terminals allow customers to browse and order from the wider John Lewis range, including categories like fashion, beauty and nursery that are missing from the ‘at Home’ format.

The store itself is bright and easy to navigate, and the John Lewis Partners that I encountered were friendly and keen to engage – a positive sign as the company continues to expand so rapidly. In fact, the only slight disappointment was the rather small café, which feels more like a Waitrose instore coffee shop than the more extensive restaurant offer normally found in John Lewis department stores.

John Lewis at Home, Tamworth (3 Sep 2011)

Café quibble aside, this all bodes well for the sixth John Lewis at Home store, on Tamworth’s Ventura Retail Park, which is due to open on 12 October (following the fifth, in Chester, on 28 September). Still only a steel frame when I was there in June, the store had gained its cladding, glazing and signage by the time I returned ten days ago.

Tamworth's John Lewis dominates the view from the nearby Asda (3 Sep 2011)

Though similar in size to the Swindon store, the Tamworth shop’s location – on the UK’s tenth biggest retail park by expenditure (according to CACI Retail Footprint data), and the town’s main access road to the A5 – is much better. Where Swindon’s John Lewis needs to work as a destination in its own right – which it seems to be doing – the Tamworth store dominates the view from all over the retail park, and is likely to benefit from much more passing trade as shoppers head to the nearby Sainsbury’s, Asda, M&S or multitude of other big-name stores.

Finally, one site that was supposed to house a John Lewis at Home store – but now isn’t, quite – is the former home of Debenhams in Exeter’s Sidwell Street.

Traces of the 'Debenhams' lettering are still visible (6 Sep 2011)

Nearly a year ago, John Lewis announced plans to invest £8.5m in its first town centre ‘at Home’ store, bringing back into use the landmark 1960s tower block that Debenhams vacated, in 2007, upon the opening of its new store at the nearby Princesshay development.

New Debenhams at Princesshay, Exeter (6 Sep 2011)

Instead, the company announced in July that the Exeter shop would be the first of a new ‘flexible department store concept’, occuping between 65,000 and 100,000 sq ft – larger than at ‘at Home’ store, but not as big as a traditional John Lewis department store. The range, however, will cover all John Lewis’s categories, offering “an edited collection of products across fashion, home and electronics, in an inspiring and contemporary setting”, complemented by the chain’s online operation and the ability to order items not held instore.

Work underway at John Lewis Exeter (6 Sep 2011)

The Exeter store has a planned opening date of autumn 2012, and work appeared to be well advanced when I visited last week. A major part of the scheme involves raising the single-storey entrance pavilion to the height of the adjoining four-storey slab, creating a prominent glazed frontage to the corner of Sidwell Street and Paris Street.

The existing building, it has to be said, is not Exeter’s prettiest, but there’s no disputing the way it dominates the city’s skyline and the view along the main High Street. Fortunately, 3D renders of the enlarged store show a more comprehensive revamp of the building’s exterior than had previously been planned.

I’m not clear how Debenhams feels about a major competitor opening up in its former premises, particularly as both Princesshay and the John Lewis site are owned by Land Securities. The argument, however, would be that John Lewis’s arrival will provide a significant boost to retail in Exeter as a whole, drawing in shoppers who would previously have had to travel to the JL store at Bristol’s Cribbs Causeway.

John Lewis Bristol (18 May 2010). Photograph by Mark Leaver

CACI currently ranks Plymouth (at #26 in the UK, with annual expenditure of £760m) as the South West’s second biggest retail centre after Bristol, just ahead of Exeter (at #30 with £710m), but I’d be surprised if the benefits from John Lewis don’t lift Exeter above its Devon rival.

With John Lewis having “identified at least ten locations across the UK which could support these bespoke department stores”, and further expansion planned for the ‘at Home’ format, new John Lewis stores look likely to pop up all over the country in the next few years – helping the chain to reach more of those customers who, it believes, would like to be able to access a John Lewis shop.

The challenge, however, will be ensuring that rapid expansion doesn’t compromise the high standards of training and customer service for which John Lewis is rightly renowned; and that increasing ubiquity doesn’t undermine the very cachet that has made John Lewis so popular for so long.

John Lewis Tamworth (17 Jun 2011)

Following the confirmation, in April, that John Lewis will indeed be opening one of its ‘At Home’ stores in Tamworth, work on site seems to be proceeding rapidly ahead of the Ventura Park store’s planned autumn opening.

Screens around the site make it difficult to get a good photograph, but when I dropped by earlier today the steel frame looked to be largely in place. Meanwhile, the vast scale of the 42,000 sq ft shop is already apparent, with the premises dominating the main route into the retail park (below).

John Lewis Tamworth (17 Jun 2011)

The Tamworth store will be the fifth John Lewis at Home shop to open since the concept launched, in Poole, in October 2009, and one of two (with Chester) to open this year. Two more stores are scheduled to open in 2012: one in Newbury, and another – announced this week – in Ashford.

However, work on the ‘at Home’ store that was originally announced for Exeter city centre appears to be on hold, with reports that a full-line John Lewis department store is now planned for the site instead. Wednesday’s Ashford announcement cites all the other future openings, yet any mention of the Exeter store is noticeably absent.

Cardinal Point, Tamworth (17 Jun 2011)

Barely 100m from the Tamworth John Lewis, work is also progressing on the separate Cardinal Point retail development, which will house new stores for B&Q, Next and Maplin.

Cardinal Point, Tamworth (17 Jun 2011)

These developments add to a sprawling retail cluster that already includes a large Sainsbury’s, Asda and M&S, as well as more than twenty other retail park staples such as Boots, Outfit, Homebase and Hobbycraft.

Ventura Park stores (17 Jun 2011)

However, the way in which Ventura Park has grown up over the years means that it comprises half a dozen distinct, but adjacent, retail zones, each with its own car park. This, and the distinctly unfriendly pedestrian environment, means that shoppers will often move between two or three different car parks over the course of one visit, adding to the traffic pressures.

Road improvement works at Ventura Park, Tamworth (17 Jun 2011)

I was therefore relieved to see that improvements are being made to Ventura Park’s overburdened road system, which – in a case of very bad planning – also includes the main access route between Tamworth and the A5 dual carriageway.

With the John Lewis and B&Q developments likely to attract even more visitors to what is already one of the Midlands’ busiest retail parks, these improvements surely can’t come soon enough.

John Lewis logo

No, don’t choke on your cornflakes… that’s a serious question.

My interest was piqued last month when the Tamworth Herald ran a story under the headline ”Striking design’ of unit to be built next to Herald offices’, on the town’s ever-growing Ventura Retail Park.

In it, the piece gave a few more details about what the new unit would be like, describing it as “similar in size to [Ventura's] Marks and Spencer, ASDA and Sainsbury’s” and “one of the more dominant outlets on the retail park.” It added that “while no details of which retailer will move into the building have been revealed, the building’s ‘striking’ design was unveiled last month.”

M&S at Ventura Park, Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

This immediately got me thinking. After all, there aren’t many retailers, besides John Lewis and Best Buy, who are currently opening massive, ‘strikingly’ designed stores on retail parks. B&Q was another possibility, but the same edition of the Herald had revealed that the DIY retailer was already going to be opening a new store behind Sainsbury’s, at nearby Cardinal Point, alongside a new Next and a branch of Maplin.

Publicly available planning applications are often a good source of extra information, but it’s taken me until now to check out the application for the development in question (0648/2010) – which was submitted at the end of November and approved in January. It seems that a development of the size proposed was actually already approved for this site in 2008, so the application was for a ‘variation of conditions’, with revised plans and elevations, rather than an entirely new proposal.

I was curious to see the ‘striking’ design of the building, so took a look at the elevation drawings attached to the application. Here’s a screenshot (click image to view in larger size):

Screenshot of elevation drawings

Hmmm… a large building with lots of double-height glazing, grey cladding and white lettering. Where have I seen that before? Let’s do a Google Image Search for ‘John Lewis at Home’… (again, click to see it a larger size)

Google Image search for 'John Lewis at Home' (16 Feb 2011)

What do you reckon? In the event that the new store isn’t going to be John Lewis, it’s certainly doing its very best to resemble one.

The idea of ‘John Lewis Tamworth’ may sound far-fetched to begin with – after all, the town is not known for attracting more upmarket retailers, and has a town centre that has become increasingly value-focused. However, John Lewis’s new ‘at Home’ format makes the prospect quite plausible.

Largely based on out-of-town retail parks, four such stores have opened to date – in Poole, Croydon, Swindon and Tunbridge Wells – with two more planned for Exeter (on a city centre site that used to be Debenhams) and Chester. Each John Lewis at Home offers the retailer’s full range of  furniture, furnishing accessories, electricals and home technology, though items from other departments – including fashion, beauty and nursery – can be ordered instore for home delivery or next-day collection.

If John Lewis is looking to plug the gap between its Solihull, Leicester and Nottingham stores, Tamworth’s sprawling and bustling Ventura Retail Park – which attracts visitors from all across the Midlands thanks to its strong offer and easy connections to the motorway network – begins to make good sense as a location.

Of course, two other important debates – what the continued expansion of Ventura Retail Park means for local traffic congestion and for Tamworth town centre – must not be neglected, and key to this is making it easier for Ventura visitors to access the town centre’s attractions.

Still, if John Lewis were to open in Tamworth, that would be rather a fantastic coup, wouldn’t it?

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.

Mall plan showing Peacocks (screenshot from 4 Aug 2010)

I was interested to find out a few days ago that the fashion retailer Peacocks will soon be opening a store in my old home town of Tamworth, taking a prime spot within the town centre’s Ankerside mall.

Given that jobs in the store have been being advertised since June, and with the store listed as ‘coming soon’ on Ankerside’s own website, it’s hardly entirely new news. However, it was the first my mother – who still lives in Tamworth – had heard about it when I quizzed her earlier this week.

Ankerside Shopping Centre, Tamworth (22 Dec 2008)

Peacocks opening up in Tamworth may not sound like a revelation, but new investment from a major retailer is really positive news for a town centre that has struggled to compete with the out-of-town Ventura Park complex down the road.

M&S at Ventura Park, Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

Some retailers – including Currys, Comet, JJB Sports, Mothercare and WHSmith – long ago closed their town centre sites in favour of Ventura Park, while others, like M&S, Next, Blacks and TK Maxx, have chosen to open up on the retail park instead of in the town centre. Even those major names who are represented in the centre of Tamworth often have a Ventura Park store as well, such as Argos, Boots and (soon) New Look.

Home Bargains in Tamworth's former Woolworths (19 Mar 2010)

Part of the problem has been Tamworth town centre’s chronic shortage of large, modern retail units. I’ve always thought, for example, that Peacocks, Primark and Bhs would all do well in Tamworth if only they could find the space. However, the only large unit to have become available in recent years is the old Woolworths in George Street, eventually snapped up by Home Bargains.

Wilkinson store, Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

Prior to that, the most significant new arrival was Wilkinson, in 1994. Moving back to the town after some years away, Wilko’s also had to be creative in finding space, carving out a new unit for itself in Market Street from a former Berni Inn (The Peel Arms) and the adjoining car park.

Even in the relatively modern Ankerside – opened in 1980 and extended in 1992 – only two of the 60 or so stores are really large units: Boots, which has occupied the same site since the centre opened; and the privately-owned Irish fashion retailer, Dunnes, which took over the site that originally housed Sainsbury’s. Most of the other units are very small by modern standards, keeping Tamworth well provided for with mobile phones and greetings cards, but little else.

To get over this problem, there have been several instances in the past where Ankerside has knocked units together to create larger, more attractive spaces. If I recall correctly, both New Look and Clinton Cards started off in single units, before expanding into the ones next door; similarly, the current Poundland site – previously MK One – was knocked together from two units in the 1990s to accommodate Mothercare.

The deserted Gungate Precinct awaits demolition (19 Mar 2010)

In due course, Henry Boot’s Tamworth Junction scheme, a planned £75m redevelopment of the town centre’s old Gungate Precinct site, should provide Tamworth with room for some large stores; indeed, the same developer’s success in signing up Next, Desire by Debenhams, Bhs and River Island for South Shields’ Waterloo Square scheme surely bodes well. However, it is still likely to be several years before Tamworth Junction reaches fruition.

Henry Boot's Waterloo Square retail scheme in South Shields (24 Jul 2010)

In the meantime, all Ankerside can really do is continue making the most of the space that it’s got, with the three units closest to Ankerside’s top George Street entrance (numbers 4 -7) being combined to form a more viable space for Peacocks.

All three of those shops have had a fairly heavy turnover of tenants over the years, especially recently:

• Unit 4-5 has had a few temporary uses since The Works closed down following the company’s administration in 2008; before that, I can remember it housing Rumbelows, Millets and, when the centre opened, a ladies’ fashion store. [UPDATE, 23 Aug 2010: I believe the fashion store was called Walter Hibbert.]
• Most recently, Unit 6 was briefly Baybeez^{[broken link removed]}, but before that had been Priceless Shoes, Gilesports, and a local bakers whose name escapes me – Graham something, perhaps? [UPDATE, 23 Aug 2010: At some point, the bakers was called Don Miller's Hot Bread Kitchen.]
• Unit 7 has recently housed a couple of short-lived fashion retailers (Gimme 5 and Bells Clothing), after previously being a branch of Select.

The resulting store will, I believe, have a ground-floor sales area of just under 5,000 sq ft, or around half that of the nearby Boots shop – a decent size, but still quite compact by Peacocks’ standards.

Prompted by my news, my mother duly went into town for a recce a couple of days ago, and reported that while there was some banging going on behind the scenes, there was no visible sign yet of the three units being combined, with no hoardings, and no signs proclaiming Peacocks’ impending arrival. This all suggests that it may be October or November before the store opens, assuming that the retailer is keen to be trading in the run-up to Christmas.

Given the revolving door of underwhelming tenants at that end of Ankerside, it’s clearly a very positive step to be welcoming a relatively big-name retailer that is likely to stick around for a while – unless, of course, Peacocks does so well it decides to upgrade to a larger site at Tamworth Junction.

Until then, the increase in footfall from Peacocks will hopefully boost Julian Graves in Unit 3 opposite – one of Tamworth’s most appealing shops (and a great use of what has always been an awkward-shaped unit), but whose premises of less than 1,000 sq ft are quietly being marketed as “to let”, “by way of an assignment of the existing lease.”

Absurdly, the advertisement contains the wording “Confidential Disposal – Staff Unaware”, despite the fact that it’s easy to find on Google (simply by searching for “3 ankerside”) and – just in case you were in any doubt – includes a prominent photo of the current occupant.

Screenshot of letting information for Julian Graves unit (6 Aug 2010)

It seems like a case of people who should know better really needing to understand how the Internet works…

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.

Shot from 1998 'Woolies Winter Wonderland' TV ad

 …That was the theme of Woolworths’ 1998 Christmas TV advertisement [broken link removed], in the heady, Tellytubby days when, as the ad reminds us, everyone wanted a Talking Po.  

This festive season, the incessant snow and ice has certainly made it a Winter Wonderland in the various town centres that I visited. However, 2009 has, of course, been the first Christmas without Woolies on the high street, meaning that shoppers have had to look elsewhere for their Barbies, PlayStations, and whatever the current equivalent to a Talking Po is.  

Trudging through the wintry conditions, I did manage to snap a few more ex-Woolies stores during the last fortnight. Interestingly, unlike my last set of pictures, where most of the former Woolworths sites that I visited had been taken over by other retailers, many of the latest batch remain vacant.

Former Big W (now M&S), Tamworth (24 Dec 2009)

The former Woolies up first is a bit of a cheat, in that it’s not one of the 807 stores that closed down following Woolworths’ collapse into administration last year, but is one that had already shut – and been taken over – shortly prior to that.  

The former out-of-town Big W at Tamworth’s Ventura Park is certainly one of the more shortlived Woolies stores (having opened, I think, in summer 2001), as well as one of the larger stores to open in recent years (90,000 sq ft). The shop lasted only until late 2004 in its original form, when it was split into two: Woolies kept the left-hand half (rebranding it from Big W to Woolworths), while the right-hand half was subsequently taken over by Marks & Spencer, which opened its own store there in November 2005.  

However, even the shrunken Woolies failed to last very long. In April 2008, Woolworths closed its store at Ventura Park all together, M&S having made an offer to take over the remainder of the building. The revamped and extended Marks & Spencer opened in December 2008, and certainly seemed to be pretty busy when I visited over Christmas. Given what happened to the Woolworths chain just a few months after the closure of the Ventura Park store, it’s probably no bad thing for Tamworth that M&S had taken over the site already. (Tamworth’s separate town centre store – closed on 2 January 2009, and now Home Bargains – has already been featured in a previous blog post.)

Former Woolworths, Burton upon Trent (23 Dec 2009)

Over in nearby Burton upon Trent, in contrast, the former Woolies in the Coopers Square shopping centre is yet to find a new occupant. However, it’s hard to imagine the unit being empty for too long, given that the centre has several strong anchors (Bhs, M&S, Primark, New Look), a modern and appealing environment, and very few other empty shops.

Former Woolworths (now TJ Hughes), Westfield, Derby (23 Dec 2009)

Down the road in Derby, the large former Woolworths in the Westfield shopping centre (the extended and renamed former Eagle Centre) has been taken over by TJ Hughes, and has reportedly been trading well since its opening in September. Woolworths had occupied the site back in the Eagle Centre days, but this photograph shows the extent of the changes made to the store’s London Road frontage as part of the Westfield revamp.

Former Woolworths, Alfreton (23 Dec 2009)

Still in Derbyshire, the old Woolies in Alfreton High Street is another of those that remains vacant. It’s quite an interesting store in that it’s a rather awkward amalgamation of a traditional-looking Woolworths building (the portion on the right) with part of the adjacent block to the left. Presumably at some point Woolies must have expanded from its original building into the premises next door?

As you know, I’m generally sceptical about the merits of dividing up large former Woolworths units; in Alfreton, however, I can’t help thinking that it would really enhance the streetscape to split this property back into two separate shops – or at least to install a new shopfront that is more sympathetic to the contrasting heights and styles of the two buildings. 

Former Woolworths (now Amber Value), Ripley (23 Dec 2009)

Down the road in Church Street in Ripley, Derbyshire, the inclusion of the property above in this blog is again something of a cheat, given that it has not been a Woolworths store for many years. There’s a personal story behind this store though, in that my grandparents (and much of my family) lived in Ripley during my childhood, and I can well remember visiting Ripley’s Woolies with my gran and parents.

When the store shut (in January 1990, I believe), I can still recall my gran grumbling about the then state of Ripley’s town centre, recognising the symbolic importance – and the humiliation, almost – of the town losing its Woolworths. Twenty years on, however, you might argue that Ripley has had the last laugh. When Woolworths closed, the long-established Amber Value store – then occupying the narrow, two-bay property that you see in the middle of the picture above – extended into the much larger Woolworths premises next door (the left-hand building in the photo), increasing its floor area several times over as a result.

Since then, Amber Value has continued to trade successfully from the site, offering an eclectic but highly useful range of household items, such as homewares, gardening products, stationery and toiletries. Today, the store is rightly valued by local people as a place to buy items that are not readily available elsewhere in the town centre – everything, you might argue, that Woolworths used to be.

Former Woolworths (now Lighthouse charity shop), Heanor (23 Dec 2009)

Back to the more recent Woolies closures, and in nearby Heanor the old Woolworths store is occupied by a Lighthouse charity shop, though only on a short-term basis judging by the continued presence of a ‘To Let’ sign. I wasn’t familiar with this enterprise prior to my visit, but I understand that Lighthouse is a growing chain of charity shops across Derbyshire operated by Valley CIDS, a Christian charity “that is committed to building and strengthening community in and around Derbyshire”, and which works “to support children and families through outreach work in schools and the wider community”.

As has happened in Burnley – where the YMCA has turned the 16,000 sqft former Woolworths into the largest charity superstore in the country – there are inevitably questions about how effective a charity shop can be in enhancing the fortunes of a town centre, particularly in the aftermath of an important Woolworths store being lost. As a shorter-term measure, however, using such units to promote beneficial charity work is surely preferable to the properties lying empty.

Former Woolworths, Dumfries (29 Dec 2009)

The two remaining former Woolies featured here are indeed both stores that have yet to find a new occupant. The first, in Dumfries, was reported back in September as being ‘under offer’, though there was no evidence of anything happening – and a ‘To Let’ sign still in place – when I visited last week.

Former Woolworths, Dumfries (29 Dec 2009)

Fittingly, given the Winter Wonderland theme with which we started, the final Woolies for now is the one in Chester-le-Street, photographed – during a snow shower – just yesterday. Unfortunately for Chester-le-Street town centre, the still vacant Woolworths premises in Front Street are directly opposite those of the former Co-op department store, which closed down in 2007 and is only partly reoccupied (by Peacocks, since April 2009).

Former Woolworths, Chester-le-Street (2 Jan 2010)

Throughout these changes, it’s refreshing to see Chester-le-Street Heritage Group doing its bit to both promote and document the town’s retail history, including setting up a display of old photographs of the Woolworths store during its final days. The former Woolworths store is certainly an attractive building in a very central location within Chester-le-Street, so I’d be surprised if the Heritage Group didn’t have some good news to report upon and document during 2010.