No missing the fact that Peacocks is coming... (20 May 2010)

The opening of St Andrew’s Way back in February – and Hollister, belatedly, in April – may have been this year’s biggest retail events in Newcastle, but, three months on, there continue to be interesting and significant developments in fashion retail elsewhere in the city centre.

At Monument Mall, work is now well underway on the new Peacocks store, occupying the three-storey, 17,000 sq ft unit that formerly housed Zavvi, the Virgin Megastore, and before that Woolworths.

You can’t see anything happening inside from the ground floor of the Mall, or from Northumberland Street, as both frontages are boarded off. Rather, one of the most noticable things is that the Mall smells different to usual – of paint and wood, rather than Millies Cookies!

Northumberland Street frontage of new Peacocks store (20 May 2010)

However, go up or down a level and you can see right into the shop – shiny white tiled floors, escalators and stairs are all visible, with work looking well progressed ahead of the reported opening on 1 July. I’d have taken some pictures closer up, but there will still men in there working at 5:30, and I didn’t fancy being accosted for taking illicit snaps…

New Peacocks store from basement level of Monument Mall (20 May 2010)

Across town on the corner of Newgate Street and Blackett Street, work has also started on redeveloping the recently vacated Arcadia space into a new Next store, which – at 55,000 sq ft – will be one of the fashion retailer’s largest stores in Britain when it opens early in 2011.

Site of new Next store in Newcastle (16 May 2010)

...and the same view back in January

Again, there’s not a great deal to see yet, but the Topman and Topshop signs have been taken down, the site screened off, and some mysterious holes punched into the brick façade facing Newgate Street.

As far as I’m aware, there’s no further news on which retailer might replace Next’s current shop on Northumberland Street, but there’s still plenty of time for details to emerge. One sure thing is that we’re likely to be seeing Newcastle’s fashion retailers playing musical shops for some time yet, as new units are carved out and existing ones freed up.

Former Zavvi, Newcastle (27 Sep 2009)

Well, that’s a surprise! I’ve only just discovered that I’ve been photographing and blogging about a former Woolworths store – here, and more recently here – without even realising it. 

While I was vaguely aware that there had been a Woolies in Newcastle’s Northumberland Street many years ago, I hadn’t realised that it occupied the soon-to-be-Peacocks former Zavvi building. 

Woolworths, Northumberland Street, c.1970?. Photograph from Newcastle Libraries

The presence of the Fenwick department store in both shots above is the giveaway – and Newcastle Libraries’ superb Flickr stream has quite a few more images that show the Woolies store in all its glory. Interestingly, one great shot shows the Woolworths store still open in 1983; presumably someone out there can shed light on when it closed, and whether the property was anything else prior to becoming the Virgin Megastore. [UPDATE, 29 October 2010: I've sourced some old newspaper articles referring to Next's takeover of the site in 1985, and which infer that Woolies shut in 1984. More of that in a future post, I hope.]

The fate of the Northumberland Street shop seems to have mirrored that of many other large, city centre Woolworths stores across the UK. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Woolworths developed many flagship shops – department stores, essentially – in major city centres, occupying several floors and a prominent location. At the same time, there was often a smaller store at the other end of town – just like the branch in Newcastle’s Clayton Street. 

However, the 1980s saw Woolies downsizing or closing many of these flagship stores, at the same time as withdrawing from certain product areas (such as adult clothing and groceries) to focus upon the ranges for which it latterly became best known – toys, confectionery, homewares, entertainment and children’s clothing. Thus, cities such as Leeds and Newcastle lost their main Woolworths store at this time, but kept the smaller one. 

Similarly, when I lived in Sheffield in the 1990s, I remember hearing about the Woolworths store in Haymarket that had closed down some years before, having been rebuilt in the 1950s following war damage. The unit later became Dunnes Stores (which closed down and then reopened in the same spot a few years later), and currently houses a large branch of Wilkinson. 

Meanwhile, Sheffield’s second branch, on The Moor, lasted right through to Woolies’ ultimate demise at the end of 2008. In a neat twist, bringing us back to where this blog post started, that site too is reportedly going to become a Peacocks.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for the use of the historic photograph of Woolworths in Northumberland Street.

Monument Mall... in Lichfield

It’s always fun to find links between my current home of Tyneside and my previous one of Staffordshire – Tamworth playing Gateshead in the Blue Square Premier, for example – but the latest link is the most bizarre yet.

You may remember that, back in August, I remarked upon the outdated website for Newcastle’s Monument Mall shopping centre, and suggested that the two-year-old mall guide – promoting long-closed-down Boots, Benetton, JJB Sports and Virgin Megastore shops – hardly conveyed a good first impression to potential visitors to the mall, and was “truly terrible PR”.

Monument Mall

Needless to say, when I revisited http://www.monumentmall.info/ today, I was not quite sure whether I would find an updated site, or the same content as before. What I certainly hadn’t expected to find was… the website for the Three Spires Shopping Centre in Lichfield (which can more usually be found at http://www.threespireslichfield.com/). The screenshot above shows the Monument Mall URL with the Three Spires website.

Both Monument Mall and Three Spires are owned by St Martins Property Investments Ltd, but it looks like someone needs to make a New Year’s Resolution to get their domain forwarding fixed… before any shoppers turn up at Monument Mall expecting to find TJ Hughes and M&S Simply Food.

UPDATE, 28 January 2010: Aha! It appears that there is a brand new Monument Mall website at http://www.newcastle-shopping.co.uk/. Even so, it would surely make sense for the old URL to point there rather than (still) to Lichfield…

Clas Ohlson sign

With so many old Woolworths sites being taken over by familiar high street names and pound shops, it’s nice when the new arrival is something a little more interesting. So I was pleased to read that the Swedish “modern hardware brand” Clas Ohlson is going to be opening up in the former Woolies in Kingston upon Thames, and is also looking to occupy the old Woolworths site in Reading.

If you’ve never heard of Clas Ohlson, you can be forgiven. Established by Mr Clas Ohlson in 1918, the company has grown to over 100 stores across Sweden, Norway and Finland. However, its presence in the UK goes back only to November last year, when it opened its first British store in Croydon’s Whitgift Centre (a unit previously split between Books etc. and a standalone George store), followed by a second, in Manchester’s Arndale Centre, in April.

Clas Ohlson's existing Croydon store

In the middle of a recession, some might say that it’s a brave move for any company to make its first ventures into the UK market – particularly given the fate that has recently befallen other homeware retailers such as ILVA and The Pier. To be fair though, Clas Ohlson’s positioning seems to be more as a funkier, Scandinavian twist on Wilkinson or Robert Dyas, mixed with a Lakeland-rivalling array of useful (or merely baffling) gadgets such as plastic drain cleaners, battery testers, painted Dalecarlian horses, and scrubbing gloves for root vegetables.

Certainly, Clas Ohlson’s product range is eclectic and difficult to pigeonhole, with categories such as art supplies, clocks, fishing equipment, stationery and toys sitting alongside an extensive range of household, garden, DIY and electrical products.

Cannily, Clas Ohlson’s assortment also seems to tapping into the growing trend among credit-crunch-savvy Brits for mending rather than replacing, suggesting that:

“British people are just as interested as us in the Nordic region in fixing various things in their homes. Our broad range of products that solve small, practical problems in everyday life satisfies these interests and needs.”

With only Croydon and Manchester to choose from, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to visit either of Clas Ohlson’s UK shops. However, it looks and sounds very much like the type of store in which I could happily spend some considerable time, with lots of interesting, practical items presented within a store environment that is typically Scandinavian – clean, modern, and with a distinctive and engaging personality.

During the 2009/10 financial year, the company apparently plans to open four to eight stores in the UK, which raises the question of where those additional new stores might be. Might Newcastle be on the target list?

Clas Ohlson is certainly the type of store that would bring some more interest to Newcastle city centre, and with the completion of the Eldon Square extension next spring there will be a fair amount of existing retail space being freed up. Realistically though, the city centre doesn’t have very many units available that are big enough or in the right place.

Eldon Square’s new St Andrew’s Way, anchored by Debenhams and New Look, will offer the quality, modern space that Clas Ohlson would be looking for, but seems fairly full up already^{[broken link removed]} - mostly, it must be said, with relocations from the older parts of Eldon Square (more of that, perhaps, in a future post). The premises that New Look will be freeing up (the former WHSmith store in Sidgate) are over two levels and are about the right size, but suffer from being at the gloomiest and seemingly least visited end of Eldon Square. So, no good there.

Elsewhere in the city centre, something must surely happen eventually to the wonderful former Co-op department store building in Newgate Street, particularly now that it has become a prime location directly opposite the entrance to the new Debenhams. With five floors to fill, however, it’s unlikely to suit Clas Ohlson – or any of the other big names currently missing from Newcastle, such as Zara – unless the building gets carved up between several retailers.

The empty Co-op department store in Newcastle

The unit previously occupied by The Pier in the attractive Eldon Garden shopping centre might also be an option. Across two floors, it’s probably just about big enough, and would attract those gadget-hungry shoppers who already visit the nearby Lakeland shop. On the downside, Eldon Garden’s rather peripheral location and seemingly high turnover of stores may not offer the best environment for long term success.

Rather, I would put my money on the ideal location for Clas Ohlson being the old Zavvi store in Monument Mall. As I observed in a blog post just over a year ago, Monument Mall seems to have been struggling of late, with the unfortunate, but unavoidable, loss of Zavvi following on from the departure of Boots, Benetton and JJB Sports.

With so many closures, you can perhaps excuse the floor plan on the Monument Mall website^{[broken link removed]} for suggesting that the shopping centre still houses all these shops, along with a ’Virgin Megastore’. (Seriously, though – what on earth is going on when a shopping centre’s official website features a mall guide that is two years out of date? Truly terrible PR.)

Given this backdrop, Monument Mall would surely welcome the arrival of a strong anchor store, while the three-storey Zavvi unit would give Clas Ohlson all the space it needs along with a prominent frontage on Northumberland Street, Newcastle’s prime shopping thoroughfare.

So, Clas Ohlson – how about it?