Farewell, M&S. Sauchiehall Street won't be the same without you

Just 12 years later, however, it is being closed down.

Tonight, at 5pm, the lights will be snapped off for the last time, and the doors locked. It will be an emotional moment for the staff, many of whom have worked there for years.

Two years of pandemic-related disruption visited upon Scotland’s retail sector have seen the closure of many shops and stores, but the loss of such an M&S operation – one that has been trading since November 1935, a time when the Second World War was still four years away – is striking.

In an email to customers, M&S said that after careful consideration it had decided to close the store. “This has been a difficult decision that we haven’t taken lightly”, it added.

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In a statement, M&S regional manager David Bates said: “Shopping habits are changing, and this means we need to focus our investment on the right stores in the right places so we can provide the very best shopping experience for our Glasgow customers”.

The shuttering of M&S Sauchiehall would mean the company could invest in its 12 other Glasgow stores, including the substantial one on Argyle Street.

Argyle Street was where M&S opened its first Glasgow store, in 1919, at number 28 (larger new premises were launched at nos 18-26 in April 1930). When the Sauchiehall operation got underway in 1935 it joined a panoply of retail names in the city: Pettigrews and Stephens, Copland’s, Rowan’s, Lewis’s Royal Polytechnic, Wylie and Lochhead, Henderson’s, Fraser, Sons & Co, R.W. Forsyth and C&A Modes.

Boness Ltd, on Argyle Street, had just launched a Scottish first, a ‘store within a store’ in which no item was priced above five shillings. It was opened on October 12 by the actress Jose Collins (Maid of the Mountains). A few days later she was followed by the radio and stage act, Elsie and Doris Waters, then by the actor and producer Leslie Henson and the actress and singer, Florence Desmond.

This was an era when the Glasgow Herald published wanted adverts placed by householders keen to engage domestic servants – cooks, general-purpose workers, house and table-maids; “Girl (capable) wanted, experienced housework and plain cooking”, runs a typical example.

Many genteel stores advertised their quality goods along the following lines: “The exquisite beauty of fine linen makes it dear to every woman’s heart, and doubly attractive as a Christmas gift.”

As it happens, the new M&S store also opened just a month after the birth of another Glasgow institution. Rogano, a long-established men’s drinking establishment at 11 Exchange Place, was acquired by the hotelier and restaurateur, Don Grant, and began a new chapter as a seafood restaurant and wine bar. Over the decades the M&S store has seen Sauchiehall Street’s own fortunes soar and decline. At the moment, the street is not looking particularly good. There are almost too many empty and forlorn shop-units to count.

Watt Brothers lies vacant, as do the big BhS premises further down the road (though two businessmen have just unveiled £20m plans to turn the former into a boutique hotel). The ABC music venue was wiped out by the fire that hit the Glasgow School of Art a few years ago. The sizeable block containing Victoria’s nightclub is an empty lot, following a spectacular blaze.

On the plus side there’s no end of lively pubs and restaurants; there’s a very busy Tesco Express, and the specially-created Sauchiehall Avenue, which stretches from Charing Cross to Rose Street, looks attractive, with its widened pavements, trees, cycle-paths and intelligent street lighting. The debit side, however, can’t be overlooked.

Many people have lamented the street’s decline over the years: politicians, retail experts, shoppers, journalists. The Evening Times writer Jack House, prompted by the decision by Arnotts to pull out of the Sauchiehall Street Centre in 1985 (the company cited a spiralling rates bill there and its two other premises in the city), recalled the great institutions of Sauchiehall Street: Hengler’s Grand Cirque, Ferrari’s restaurant, the Empire Theatre, Daly’s Corner, La Scala cinema, Lyons the stationers, the Copland and Lye store and its next-door rival, Pettigrew and Stephens, the McLellan Galleries, and a host of long-gone tea-rooms.

Once, House added, he had even joined a march of the unemployed, led by a bowler-hatted John Maclean, the Red Clydeside MP, en route to George Square.

Back in November 1969, House had called in at the Sauchiehall Street flat-cum-studio of one Jean-Jacques Oberlin, doyen of the French colony in the west of Scotland.

Oberlin had in his time been an actor and a broadcaster, and in addition to being president of the Franco-Scottish Association he was now giving private lessons in English. By the time he sat down with House he had lived in Glasgow for all of 56 years, and for nearly all that time on the street. Something of a boulevardier, he liked to stroll up and down the street, dropping into a French-style café for an aperitif. “I am very fond of Sauchiehall Street, m’sieur,” he said, “but not so much since it became a one-way street. That has very nearly spoiled it for me. I find I am kept to my own side of the boulevard because it is so difficult to cross”.

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It would be interesting to know what Oberlin would have made of the sorry state of the street today.

As long ago as 1906 Sauchiehall Street was admiringly described as the “Piccadilly of Glasgow with its parks and terraces at the west end and theatres at the east end, it is the brightest and gayest street in Glasgow, the only street of pleasure”.

By Depression-era 1930, however, a sharp reduction in sales takings in the street’s shops and stores prompted The Scotsman newspaper to ask whether “the shopping centre of Glasgow” was beginning to lose its attraction.

The street went on to endure numerous setbacks in the mid-1960s – due, as a city planner later put it, to the building of Glasgow’s M8 and the disappearance of various properties and landmarks at the Charing Cross end, leading to a lack of interest and confidence in the street.

By 1970 traders were fearing that Sauchiehall and other key parts of the city centre would be a “wilderness” by the time the M8 opened. They spoke of numerous difficulties: the one-way traffic system, the rate burden and the selective employment tax, the shift of residents out to peripheral housing schemes. A Glasgow Herald report in February 1971 spoke of the “sad number of empty premises” in the street.

Pedestrianisation of at least part of Sauchiehall had been mooted as an experiment since about 1969. The first pedestrianised precinct, between Rose Street and West Nile Street, was launched with fanfare in December 1972. Glasgow’s highways convener suggested that it should be renamed Sauchiehall Parade; his proposal rejected, he noted that most of his colleagues “seem to have a great sentimental attachment to Sauchiehall Street”.

Judging by remarks posted on Facebook, some people, today, still have a sentimental attachment to the Marks & Spencer store.

One man, contributing to the Lost Glasgow Facebook page, recalls going into town as a young boy with his mother on the bus and using M&S as a shortcut between Renfrew Street and Sauchiehall Street. “I was always terrified that we would be arrested!”, he added. “That wasn’t yesterday, or the day before, but 60-odd years later I still do it. But not for much longer apparently”.

“This is devastating”, remarks one woman on the same page. “It’s a lovely old-fashioned shop”. Others, however, had a decidedly less flattering view of the store, or of the street of which it has so long been part.

Sir Tom Hunter, the businessman and entrepreneur, who knows a thing or two about retail, has made the obvious point that customers had decided not to go into the M&S store. “If the customer was still shopping in there, Marks & Spencer would keep it open”.

His fellow tycoon, Lord Willie Haughey, said of the closure: “Where it’s sad for me, is I spent half of my apprenticeship on the roof of Marks & Spencer in Sauchiehall Street, installing systems. Ah dear, it was great for sunbathing, mind you!”

Diane Brady, 58, of Glasgow, worked part-time in the busy ladieswear section of the Sauchiehall Street premises, having joined in 2003. Before then, she had worked on the beauty department of Fraser’s in Buchanan Street, long one of the most prestigious stores in Scotland.

“I really enjoyed my 13 years at Marks”, said Diane, who for the last seven years has been working at the M&S at The Fort. “I got a real buzz out of working there and the place was really busy in the days when Sauchiehall Street had a lot going for it. I think the closure of BhS, just down the street, was the start of the decline for Marks.

“I remember when Marks got new designers and buyers in to keep their ladieswear customers and to move with the times, like when they brought in the Autograph and Per Una ranges. These seemed to do the trick, and they were very successful.

“We dealt with customers of all ages and it’s the same at the Fort”, she added. “The customers were great in Sauchiehall Street and I was on first-name terms with many of them.

“I thought Marks was a good employer, and the staff were great – I made so many friends there that I still have today.

“Unfortunately, I joined too late to benefit from the free hairdressers’ and the dental treatment that used to be offered to staff. But it was a lovely place to work. I’m sad to see the store closing down after nearly 90 years. Sauchiehall Street is looking so run-down at the moment”.

Of the store’s 97 current workers, David Bates says: “We’ve worked hard to find alternative roles with M&S for as many colleagues as possible and have achieved this for the majority of those affected. Our priority is supporting everyone through these changes. We would like to thank all our brilliant Sauchiehall Street colleagues ... and all our Glasgow customers who have shopped with us in this store”.

As for the distinctive premises the store occupied for 87 years, Bates said: “We want to make sure [it] finds a complementary alternative use for the area, and we are in discussions with a potential partner. We will keep the community updated as these developments progress”.

Come 5pm tonight, then, the store will be no more. Things will move on, the place will probably find a new future. But it’s another sobering loss for the street on which it stands.