A man who owns a pub on Sauchiehall Street once told me how bad business was in the area. He said there was no longer any real reason for people to come to Glasgow’s most famous street and the only saving grace was its branch of M&S. “If that closed,” he said, “God knows what would happen to Sauchiehall Street."
And now it’s happening. Marks and Spencer has announced that its Sauchiehall Street branch is to close in April and investment will be made instead at the store in Argyle Street. The company’s regional manager David Bates said shopping habits were changing and it meant the company needed to focus investment on the right stores in the right places.
Not only is this terrible news for the staff, who will hopefully be found jobs elsewhere in the company, it’s also pretty gutting for regular customers like me. I bloody love that shop and went there at least four times a week for ten years. That’s four times a week at a fiver a time for lunch, which, excluding holidays, means I spent £9,200 in a decade and that’s not even counting the times I got dinner and wine there. And it was worth every penny I have to say. The food and staff are brilliant.
But what happens now? In some ways, the picture as a whole is not all that bad for M&S because they’ve just had a record-breaking Christmas – sales in the 13 weeks to January were £3.3bn, 18.5% more than the same time last year, and its food division had its highest sales ever. Their clothing and home sectors have also started growing again after years of decline.
However, the M&S on Sauchiehall Street is something of a special case and faced a very particular problem; its regional manager put his finger on it when he said the company needed to focus on “the right stores in the right places”. Leigh Sparks, professor of retail studies at Stirling, also identified the issue when he told me the problem with Sauchiehall Street was the centre of Glasgow has effectively shifted to the other end of town so the street was no longer as important as it once was. “Why would you spend lots of time there?” he said. “What's the draw?"
I think anyone who’s ever lived or worked in the centre of Glasgow will know what Professor Sparks means and can see that the Sauchiehall Street M&S is a victim of the trend – it’s also the reason the company is focusing on Argyle Street. The trickier question is how to solve the bigger problem of the street itself and some of the people I’ve spoken to over the years think the answer is to attract more shops and big-name brands.
There are others, however, who take a different approach and accept that the days of big-name stores like M&S on the street may be over. A few of the people I spoke to pointed out that Sauchiehall Street has many cultural assets in and around it: the CCA, the art school, the conservatoire, the theatres at either end, and their argument is that you could start to build round that hub not just with retail but other businesses too.
The suggestion essentially is that rather than an almost total reliance on retail, you create something that’s instead based on restaurants, cafes and bars (like Finnieston) but also residential. Someone from the Chamber of Commerce pointed out to me that Glasgow city centre has about half the population you’d expect compared to Birmingham and Manchester – if you changed that, the atmosphere of the street could also change profoundly.
This will not happen quickly – and it doesn’t immediately solve the sight of all those empty shop fronts that sit there like missing teeth in a broken jaw. But I can’t help thinking about that publican who worried about the future of the place where he makes his living. God knows what will happen if M&S closes, he said. But now the thing he feared is happening and it means our beloved street needs a different kind of future.
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