I’ve already featured the former Woolies buildings in Kirkcaldy, Dumbarton, Morecambe and Dundee.

Here’s a couple more Art Deco former Woolies premises located in Fife.

The first is in St Andrews, photographed still in its Woolies livery. Nice detailing above the windows and on the roof line. (It has been converted to a Nisa shop since the photo was taken.)

The second is in Cowdenbeath. Not so much ornamentation on this one; just the roof detail really. As you can see, it’s a Poundstretcher now. (I took the picture before Saturday’s game.)

Well, not that one anyway.

The Woolies store in Kirkcaldy was L-shaped. The back part was the first to be taken over: by clothes retailer Peacocks – now looking like they’re in administration themselves what with the 70% off signs for their January sales. They moved in a few months ago.

Relatively recently the other part of the Woolies shop – which had originally been a Tesco’s before they took over William Low’s and moved their operation to the Low’s site in the Postings shopping area – morphed into something called Home Bargains, which is best described as Woolies with added food.

The half-price sale sign on the right edge of the picture is actually for a JJB Sports shop which is up some stairs and in which I’ve not set foot.

The Mercat is an indoor mall, hence the darkness of the photos, taken as they were around 5pm on a winter’s evening.

Edited to add:- Peacock’s isn’t in administration, just having a sale.

I took these when I was over in May for the Elgin game. That now seems long ago and oh so far away.

They are all in the High Street or corner onto it.

This is Woolies. Note the similarities with the Dundee former Woolies I posted a while back.

Burton’s. Firmly in the house style.

Former Claude Alexander’s clothing store. Just across Quay Street from Burton’s.

Former City Bakeries building. The windows used to be lovely but they’ve been messed about.

Also in Morecambe close to the Midland Hotel on the sea front on the other side of the road were these two Art Deco buildings.

The first was once a Woolworths.

Here it is when it was a Woolies.

The other houses a Hitchens
This is someone else’s close in view.

There was one more Deco-ish building much further along the front but time was getting short so I didn’t photograph it.

As promised, more pictures of my stroll round Dundee.

The top floors of this building are now filled by a JJB Sports and the ground floor has a Tesco Metro.

From the styling it looks to me as if it originally was a Woolworths but I’ve not sufficient knowledge of Dundee to be sure of that. I couldn’t get far enough back across the street to frame the whole building.

There are some nice flourishes around the windows.

There are four identical embellishments on the roof edge. Some of them are sprouting plants.

The building next to this (housing an Evans) has a clocktower that is obviously Deco influenced but must be much more recent.

There is another Murraygate view here of this possible Dundee Woolworths.

Today Woolies in Kirkcaldy ran its shutter down for the last time.
A fixture on the British High Street for nearly 100 years, a lot of Woolies’ shops were in Art Deco style buildings. Though the Kirkcaldy store shut for a while (its location was at the “wrong” end of the High Street, which ironically has recently undergone something of a regeneration: that’ll probably Credit crunch to a close) it reopened in 1998 in a mall location, The Mercat, which runs off the High Street and back round again to the rear of Marks & Sparks.
I remember the Dumbarton and Helensburgh stores fondly from my youth. They had fantastic wooden floors, their bon-bons and rum and butter caramels were a delight to my young sweet tooth and more recently it used to be good for buying cheaply singles that had recently fallen out of the charts.
I can’t say I made the Kirkcaldy store a destination every week but it was good to have it available for all those things it sold that nowhere else in the town centre did and it held a better selection of sweets than the local Tesco.
It was sad to see the state to which the administrators reduced it in its final days – ugly reduced posters plastered everywhere, as many laundry hooks as you could ever wish for (plus hundreds more,) empty spaces galore on the shelves.
I think it could have been viable but the latest high-ups allowed no leeway to local managers and as a result some of the items for sale verged on the bizarre (though it wasn’t actually in Woolies I saw racks of England tops for sale in Kirkcaldy.)
It will leave a big gap in the Mercat.
Doctorvee has recently posted about Woolies history and has another post planned.

Today, sadly, Woolworths went into administration. This looks like the demise of one of the fixtures of British High Streets (though the company started in the US) since ever I can remember. 99 years in fact. Some of their original shops were Art Deco too.

Another source of sadness is that doctorvee works part-time in the Kirkcaldy branch, so it’s like a personal blow.

It is the latest, but will not be the last, victim of the credit crunch. The company is probably viable on a day to day basis but its creditors wanted their money back. Since this has forced Woolies into administration they will now most likely not get it (or at least not all of it.)

There had been attempts to sell it to someone else for £1 and they would take the debt over, but these have fallen through.

Most likely the immediate reason for today’s administration is that the staff were due to be paid tomorrow and the money wasn‒t readily available for that; or their bank (Barclay’s) wouldn’t make it available.

Ironically, Woolies’s cash flow was probably quite good this week as they have had a 20% off offer on everything (only 10% on DVDs and electrical goods.) The Kirkcaldy store has certainly been busy. Yet I suppose these moneys would not have got through the system in time to prevent the administration.

While supermarkets have been expanding into most product areas and therefore undermining them and the rise of £ shops undercut them, Woolies was still the only place in the High Street where you could be sure of buying certain items – ironmongery and sewing thread spring to mind here and in Kirkcaldy their selection of sweets was greater than their competitors – so it will certainly be missed.

Some stores may be saved but most will soon have disappeared.

So it goes.