LOOKING for a bargain in the January sales in 1956 seems a bit of a grim task if these ladies are anything to go by.
This is Dallas’s Colosseum Warehouse in Glasgow’s Jamaica Street which is now, as far as I can make out, the site of Jury’s Inn.
The now demolished department store had quite a colourful past. It was originally the Grand Colosseum Warehouse which was started by Gorbals businessman Walter Wilson. He had originally started making hats, but opened his store which he called a Warehouse, suggesting lower prices, and did indeed undercut the more snooty establishments in the city. It sounds as if it was the original Primark.
The business and the building grew until it was a large department store where he put on large Christmas displays where the idea was that you tempted folk in to look around in the hope they might buy something they didn’t realise they needed. Until then you went shopping for specific items, and the idea of simply looking was a new one.
He made a fortune, but didn’t keep it all to himself as at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee he chartered boats to take 20,000 impoverished Glasgow children down to Rothesay for a day out with a picnic included.
After Walter’s death, the Colosseum passed through a few hands - Dallas’s, Paisley’s, Fraser’s until it closed just a year or so after this picture was taken. Perhaps the bargains by then weren’t so great.
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