IT'S almost a year since the huge Marks and Spencer store on Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street closed its doors after nearly nine decades of service.
The store had opened in 1935 and, based in one of Glasgow's – and Scotland's – best-known streets, it attracted a huge army of loyal customers, year after year, while seeing the street's own fortunes soar and decline.
But what the M&S company described as "changing shopping habits" meant that the store had to close.
Changing trends and habits and recessionary times have led to the shuttering of a great many shops and stores that once were retail landmarks. Here we look at a few names from the past.
M&S, Sauchiehall Street
New images were released recently, showing the potential design of the facade of the M&S building on Sauchiehall Street. Proposals have been submitted to turn the building into student housing, with accommodation for around 600 students, with commercial units on the ground floor.
It would be good to see the building in use again. Older M&S customers remember it fondly as an ever-reliable place for fashions, food and homeware.
Tower Records, Argyle Street
MANY music fans loved this unpretentious and exceedingly well-stocked store on Argyle Street, which opened across three storeys in May 1990, close to the Hielanman's Umbrella. It memorably stopped the traffic in the summer of 1995 when the top-selling American act Bon Jovi played a few songs from the first-storey window in front of a large crowd of fans and curious bystanders. Previously, Tower had hosted in-store appearances by the heavy rock group Saxon, singer Mary Black, Edwyn Collins, Texas, Del Amitri, and the all-female group His Latest Flame, amongst others. The store closed down in 2002, after a period in which the company tried in vain to hold onto its market share in the city. Its loss was keenly felt, though.
Read more: Tower closes flagship store https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/11961021.tower-closes-flagship-store/
British Home Stores, Sauchiehall Street
THE loss of this sizeable BHS department store in 2016, after more than 50 years of trading, was a blow to Sauchiehall Street's prestige. The empty building has, according to many locals, become something of an eyesore.
Watt Brothers, Sauchiehall Street
"MY grandmother worked here in the 1930s as a dressmaker. I'm sad to see the end of a place I heard so much about", one woman wrote on the store's Facebook page in December 2019 just as the axe was about to fall on the company's flagship venue. There were many such sentiments expressed elsewhere. The retailer had been established in 1915 and seemed to have been around for ever.
Jenners, Princes Street, Edinburgh
JENNERS was a landmark on Princes Street, an influential and affluent part of the capital's retail sector, for generations. It closed its doors in May 2020 as Covid restrictions bit deep. A blaze broke out on the premises last January. As The Herald reported recently, the Jenner's building is now being repurposed, with a hotel and retail offering.
Read more: New owners committed to Jenners identity https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12394565.new-owners-committed-to-jenners-identity/
Daly's, Sauchiehall Street
DALY'S department store was a Glasgow institution for more than 100 years. Its window displays were reliably stylish, and the store was also renowned for its tearoom, and its fashion-show catwalk. Not for nothing has it been described as the 'Harrods of the north'. Kate Cranston's Mackintosh-designed Willow Tea Rooms building was incorporated into Daly's in 1928; the tea-room's Salon de Luxe was used as the store;s tea rooms until the early 1980s. A few years ago, fashion historian Jade Halbert tweeted a picture of a 1950s hat-box from Daly's. "Handsome find of today", she said of it, with some pride.
Borders, Buchanan Street
ANOTHER much-missed presence in Glasgow city centre. It broke new ground in terms of what bookshops could really be like - bright, airy, engaging, friendly, with a dizzying range of books, as well as magazines, overseas newspapers and stationery, and a pretty good cafe as well. Book-lovers mourned its passing in 2009.
Read more: Borders announces Glasgow plans in 1998 https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12301939.worlds-second-largest-literary-retailer-will-take-over-prime-city-centre-site-glasgow-gets-set-for-battle-of-bookshops/
Lots of authors held book-signing events here, too, from David Gest, David Essex and Martin Clunes to former footballers Paul Gascoigne and George Best - and Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson in TV's The Simpsons. Below is an interior shot of the store, taken by the Herald's Colin Mearns in 2007.
Arnotts, Argyle Street
AS author Carol Foreman observes in her useful book, Glasgow Shops Past and Present, Arnotts was "a store for all social groups and its closing in 1994 was the end of a Glasgow tradition that stretched back almost 150 years".
In 1938 it had been merged with an adjacent, rival, store, Robert Simpson & Sons Ltd. For decades, the Jamaica Street/Argyle Street corner was known as 'Simpson's Corner'. A fire destroyed half of the building in February 1951, adds Carol, and when the store was eventually rebuilt it did not include the Jamaica Street site. From 1963 onwards the shop was called 'Arnotts', and it was completely refurbished in 1987.
House of Fraser, which had acquired the store during the 1930s, "decided that it was uneconomic to operate Arnotts and Fraser's [store] so near to each other". It was thus decided to close the former store.
Trerons, Sauchiehall Street
Carol Foreman offers much rich detail on this store. Opened by William Wilson in 1904, in the McLellan Galleries, it styled itself as 'Paris in Glasgow'. Its full name was Treron et Cie, Les Grand Magasins de Tuileries, and it had no fewer than 40 well-appointed departments.
#"Its purpose was to supply drapery merchandise in exclusive designs and exquisite qualities at prices as low as those asked in other drapery warehouses for very ordinary goods", writes Carol. "Wilson wanted to outrival in style, quality, and exclusiveness the great warehouses of London and Paris and so retain in Glasgow the orders of those ladies of the West of Scotland who otherwise would give the greatest part of their patronage to cities in the south".
Wilson cleverly instituted a 'Forenoon Shopping' scheme, whereby specially-purchased goods were available only to those customers who arrived before midday. It was a resounding success.
Treron's lived on until 1986, by which time it was known as Treron-Forsyth (the well-known store of RW Forsyth having relocated there from Renfield Street in 1983). The building was badly damaged by fire in October that year. Its neo-classical facade was reduced to a shell, the Glasgow Herald reported.
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