High Street Heroes E-Book

John Timpson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 361

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

WHEN BUSINESSMAN John Timpson started his retailing career in 1960, there were no supermarkets, no out-of-town shopping centres and not even a hint of internet shopping. The British high street was full of made-to-measure tailors and traditional grocers. Among the household names were Mac Fisheries, Dewhurst, John Collier and Timothy Whites & Taylors. In this enjoyable new book, Timpson shows how successive generations of forward-thinking shopkeepers and inspirational entrepreneurs have led the major retailers through a period of rapid change – people such as Ken Morrison, Ralph Halpern, Terence Conran and Anita Roddick, without whom our high streets would have looked very different. This unique survey – from a man who knows a few things about success in retail – paints a compelling, personal and vivid picture of how shops have changed over the last 100 years and reveals who Timpson thinks has had the biggest influence on the shape of shopping in the 'retail revolution' that we have witnessed since the 1970s.

Leseprobe

HIGH STREET HEROES

HIGH STREET HEROES

THE STORY OF BRITISH RETAIL IN 50 PEOPLE

JOHN

TIMPSON

Published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in the USA by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution 34 13th Avenue NE, Suite 101 Minneapolis, MN 55413

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada, 76 Stafford Street, Unit 300, Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1

ISBN: 978-184831-916-5

Text copyright © 2015 John Timpson

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset in Epic by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

This book is dedicated to the memory of two people who lit my interest in retailing over 55 years ago.

My father got me going with nightly conversations about the business over the washing up (he washed, I dried). Bill Branston, the Timpson shop manager in Altrincham, mentored me for my first three months as a shop assistant. He made me toe the line on the shop floor but when we spent every tea break together he passed on his tips for success.

At eighteen I was hooked; that fascination for retailing is still as strong today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Timpson CBE was born in 1943 and educated at Oundle and Nottingham University. In 1975 he became Managing Director of William Timpson Ltd, the business that had borne his family name since 1865, and he is now sole owner of the company, which has a turnover in the UK of £200m per year. His previous book was Ask John (Icon, 2014), based on his Daily Telegraph column of the same name. His book Upside Down Management (Wiley, 2010) was described by the Financial Times as ‘a practical and inspirational manual for anyone who runs a business’. Timpson and his wife Alex have been foster carers for 31 years, during which time they have fostered 90 children. He lives in Cheshire.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

46 Years On

The Supermarkets

Tesco

Sainsbury’s

Asda

Morrisons

Marks & Spencer

Dress Shops and Fashion

Ralph Halpern

George Davies

The Next Miracle

Philip Green

Sir Charles Clore

The Rise and Fall of British Shoe

The Shoe Shop Survivors

The Tailors From Leeds and Life With the Lyons

John Lewis Partnership

Traditional Department Stores

Boots and W.H. Smith

Stanley Kalms

Mobile Phone Shops

Geoff Mulcahy and the DIY Business

Price Merchants

Comeback Kids

Mail Order

Anita Roddick

Women in Retail

Sports Shops

Food on the Go

Anthony Preston and Matt Davies

Sir Terence Conran

Dean Butler

Richard Tompkins

Julian Richer

Gerald Ratner

The Unsung Heroes

My Top 50

Index

PREFACE

At the beginning of my retailing career, 55 years ago, there were no supermarkets, no out-of-town shopping centres and not even a hint of internet shopping. The high street was full of made-to-measure tailors and traditional grocers. Among the fascias you could find Mac Fisheries, Dewhurst, John Collier and Timothy Whites & Taylors.

I was asked to write about my top 50 retailers, the people I consider have made the biggest difference to UK shopping. My book goes well beyond the original brief. In making my pick I paint a picture of how shops have changed and who has had the biggest influence on the shape of shopping.

Although most commentators recognise the influence of market research, electronic point of sale, computerised stock control and sophisticated shop layout, I clearly see the main agents for change to be those forward-thinking shopkeepers and inspirational entrepreneurs who have led major retailers through a period of such rapid transformation.

At the end of the book I finally reveal my top 50, but along the way I learnt a lot about the characters who have successfully steered their companies through the recent retail revolution.

INTRODUCTION

When I started to write this book I intended to produce a light-hearted survey of my own personal top 50 retailers, but in doing so I got distracted by the bigger picture they painted of shopping in the 20th century. After a lot of detours I finally fulfilled my brief so, if you want to cheat, skip to the last chapter where my list is revealed, but you will miss all the things I discovered along the way. In compiling the list of names and their fascinating stories I learnt a lot about retailing – what works, where companies can fail, and how much has changed over the last 50 and more years.

Those who think we are currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime retail revolution have been misled. The current change in shopping habits is just one more tremor in a long earthquake that was already shaking up the high street when I started work as a shop assistant in 1960.

I was one of twelve people working in the Timpson shoe shop in Railway Street, Altrincham, led by manager Bill Branston (Mr Branston to me). The team included first sales, Mr Williamson, Miss Bruce who did the shoe dyeing, and Miss McCleod who ran the women’s and children’s floor. We were split by gender: men served men, while women – who were paid at a considerably lower rate – served women and children. Everyone called me ‘Mister John’! We all worked Monday to Saturday, but Wednesday was half-day closing in Altrincham so I left at 1.00pm and went to play golf and bridge with the retired men at Hale Golf Club.

Every customer was given personal service. We brought a selection of shoes from the boxes that lined the wall and, while sitting in front of the customer on a fitting stool, helped them try on each shoe. On a busy Saturday I had to serve three customers at once, write out the sales dockets and wrap up the goods in paper (no Sellotape – we just used string which Mr Branston could snap with his bare hands).

I realised that our Altrincham branch was relatively up to date only when, the next year, my father took me on several days out visiting other shops. Many were in city suburbs, some still surrounded by bomb damage remaining from the blitz: old-fashioned buildings where the manager still lived in the flat above the shop. As we drove round we went through some areas where there were no shops at all. ‘That’s where old C shop used to be,’ said my father as we went through Hulme in Manchester, one of many slum clearance areas where the only buildings left standing were churches and pubs. My great grandfather can’t have expected to open lots of shops because he referred to them by letters of the alphabet. His first shop in Oldham Street, Manchester was ‘A’ and all was fine until his 27th shop was opened in Levenshulme, which was ‘1’. When we installed our first computer in 1960 the letters had to go, so ‘A’ shop became 250 and ‘C’ was 252 for a few months before it was closed.

By 1960, city centres like Coventry, Plymouth and Southampton that had been severely damaged during the Second World War were rebuilt with characterless concrete buildings and pedestrian precincts. The local independent shopkeeper couldn’t afford the high rents demanded for these new shops so the shopping centres were filled with national multiple retailers. It wasn’t just the big cities that had newly built pedestrian shopping. Local authority developments popped up all over the country, often taking trade from the local community. Old streets were demolished by property developers who built new enclosed shopping centres. The first American-style precincts were the Arndale Centres, developed by Arnold Hagenbach, a baker, and Sam Chippendale, a property developer. They opened 23 centres between 1961 and 1975, which included Luton, Stretford, Wandsworth, Middleton and Manchester city centre. They, and others who copied them, changed the shape of our high streets and collected criticism along the way. As one commentator said, ‘All the old buildings – good, bad and indifferent – are replaced with chain stores, supermarkets and flats devoid of distinction, all looking alike, systematically destroying our historic centres.’

These new shopping developments gave ambitious multiple shopkeepers the perfect chance to expand, while some of the more conservative family firms were left with a portfolio of shops in declining locations. Most well-established multiple retailers had a significant number of freeholds, which became the target for acquisitive competitors like Charles Clore and Isaac Wolfson. The 1960s and 70s saw a lot of takeover activity and the development of several store groups including UDS, Sears and Burton whose big buying power brought more competitive pressure on smaller shopkeepers.

Retailers have always watched the Budget with their fingers crossed. In one phrase the Chancellor can make a significant change to our profit margins. From 1940 until 1973 the main game-changer was purchase tax, which not only could alter from budget to budget but also had different rates for different classes of goods or services, at times ranging from 0 per cent to 100 per cent. Its successor VAT has been less volatile but is now double the introductory rate of 10 per cent.

While we were watching purchase tax and VAT, the government made a major difference to retailing with the introduction of two more unlikely measures. The abolition of resale price maintenance by Edward Heath in 1964 paved the way for the price cutters and in particular accelerated the development of out-of-town supermarkets at the expense of your local corner shop. The savings now available on branded goods made a drive to an out-of-town supermarket well worthwhile.

The other government measure was a case of unintended consequences. In 1975, with inflation approaching 27 per cent, the Wilson government, keen to agree some sort of incomes policy with the unions, agreed an across-the-board maximum pay increase of £6 a week with all but a guarantee that this would be given to the lowest paid. At this time our shoe shop assistants were earning about £12 a week, so the government gave them an increase of around 50 per cent. Our wage bill rose so sharply we had to cut staffing levels, which reduced the level of service in shops and accelerated the introduction of self-service.

The other traumatic but fortunately short-lived result of government action was in 1972 during the miners’ strike when non-essential businesses (service industries like shops rather than factories) could use power for only three days a week. A few got through with their own generators, and our shoe repair outlets escaped any restriction by claiming to be a factory, but the rest simply shut up shop for half the week. Turnover was lost, but nothing like as much as had been expected (makes you wonder whether our ancestors weren’t right to close on Sundays and half a day during the week!).

It was the freehold property portfolio that persuaded UDS to buy Swears & Wells, the first business where I was given the chance to be chief executive. The 60 shops that I ran for a couple of years included two freeholds on Oxford Street, London. As a multiple specialising in selling fur coats it could never afford the market rent, and when the business was closed down, five years later, the two freeholds were sold for more money than the whole 60-shop chain had made in profit over the previous decade.

Gradually over the last 50 years the ownership of high street freeholds has passed from the retailers to insurance companies and pension funds. The new landlords ruled the roost for decades, demanding 25-year leases with five-year, upwards only, rent reviews and a draconian approach to covenants and dilapidations. It is only since 2008 that the retailers have had some chance of revenge, although a softening of rental values has been partially offset by a significant increase in business rates.

The Sainsburys, Ian MacLaurin of Tesco, and the double act of Archie Norman and Allan Leighton at Asda all brought a bit of America to the UK when developing their supermarket strategy but, despite the reputation of US retail, the British high street is mostly home-grown – perhaps we are still the nation of shopkeepers.

Trips to visit Walmart, Safeway, Piggly Wiggly and many more stateside stores have been essential research, but without any outside help our supermarket sector would still have created one of the biggest seismic shifts in shopping habits, far greater than the changes so far created by internet shopping. Ask your local butcher, baker or fishmonger (if you still have one) whether the out-of-town competition made any difference.

One American import that caused a considerable stir was trading stamps. By the time Sperry & Hutchinson stamps had crossed the Atlantic, Green Shield were already established in the UK, so the S&H stamps had to turn from green to pink. It was a new and significant way to give a discount, especially before resale price maintenance was abolished. Things got a lot worse for the downtrodden independent grocer when Tesco scrapped Green Shield Stamps over a weekend and launched stunning price cuts across the store.

During the 1970s, customers started to realise that they were expected to do more of the work: self-service had arrived and was here to stay. For some of us it was an unwelcome change. I used to drive past petrol stations until I could find one with forecourt assistance. This was before the cost of motoring took away so much of the family budget that it seriously affected every other category of spending. In 1963 only 35 per cent of households had a car and I could fill up my Morris Minor for less than £1.

The increase in self-service wasn’t just in supermarkets. Shoe shops, fashion stores, Boots and W.H. Smith all swapped counters for checkouts and customer service suffered, but not due to a lack of training. It was a time when business spent more on training than ever before. Every extra pound on the training budget brought savings in tax or extra grants from the government. Most multiple shops opened half-an-hour late once a week to hold group customer care courses. This led to the bizarre situation of customers knocking on the door desperate to be served, only to see the notice: ‘Shop closed for training – to improve the service we give our customers.’

We installed our first computer in 1961, making Timpson one of the pioneers. It was an enormous piece of kit, filling a large air-conditioned office with a series of magnetic tapes on disk calculating throughout the night simply to update a day’s stock movements in our warehouse. I expect today’s iPhones have the capacity to do the job in less than a second.

We might have been an early starter but several retailers were ahead of the game, particularly Sainsbury’s, who saw the importance of computerisation before other food retailers, and Mothercare, where founder and chief executive Selim Zilkha was the first to create a comprehensive stock control system in the clothing industry. We were keen to follow in their footsteps, believing the advice given by our computer sales team who claimed: ‘Computerisation will reduce your stock holding, and give quicker and more reliable sales statistics. The result will be higher turnover, lower costs and a better margin.’ We have upgraded our computer system several times, on each occasion installing smaller and much more powerful technology. We now can’t envisage how we survived with a paper-driven system, and have certainly cut our costs (we used to have 40 girls adding up our weekly sales figures), but we are still looking for many of the other benefits promised by a succession of computer salesmen.

By 1980 the new business schools were starting to believe that retailing is a science not an art. The idea of retail engineering, backed up by the enormous amount of data and customers’ details produced by electronic sales capture, drove a new generation of retail executives to spend their time in head office, planning the perfect shopping experience. The electronic point of sale (EPOS) tills gave head office control over prices and a team of central merchandisers could control stock levels. Instead of placing orders, local shop managers were told what to stock and where and how to display it. Unsurprisingly, a lot of companies lost the personal touch, senior management seldom visited their shops and individual customers didn’t get so much personal service.

All retailers had to face up to both new regulations and deregulation. Health and safety and employment law improved the way shops were operated, but the changes came at a cost. Many of the buildings put up during the concrete reconstruction of town centres in the 1950s and 60s used asbestos, high alumina cement and other materials that subsequently proved suspect. These blighted buildings lost their freehold value until restored by expensive maintenance. New buildings had to provide disabled access and the 1992 Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) regulations stipulated the need for separate lavatories for men and women. We had two health and safety issues that curbed sales at Timpson. In the shoe shops we used an X-ray machine to measure children’s feet – most of the kids loved the machines, and so did the mums until they discovered the potential harm from exposure to radiation. In our shoe repair factories we had to discontinue our Nu Shade service – shoe re-colouring which took place in special spray booths outside the back door. The colour change was very successful and at 7/9d (39p) a pair was very popular with customers, but part of the pleasure our colleagues got from doing the job came from what is now known as substance abuse. Nu Shade was discontinued.

Wage rates have risen dramatically. I was lucky to start on £5.7.6d (£5.38) a week. If I had been a girl, my basic weekly wage would have been less than £4. Equal pay made a big difference to retailers, especially in those sectors where the majority of shop assistants were women. More recently working time directives have increased the amount of overtime and the statutory minimum rate of pay has created a significant increase in the overall rate of pay for shop workers.

The main deregulation that changed our retail landscape was Sunday trading. When the topic was being debated before a vote in the Commons it was quite clear that this was a battle between the big boys, particularly the supermarkets, and the small local trader. It would take a much bigger percentage cost increase for a small shop to open on a Sunday than for the big supermarket down the road.

With shoe repair shops that might employ only two people, or even one, we were bound to be a loser, so I signed up to the Keep Sunday Special Campaign and paraded outside Parliament with a banner that said ‘Cobblers to Sunday Shopping’. We lost, and costs increased throughout the whole of retail.

Traditional high street shops faced increased competition from mail order companies. The biggest catalogues – Littlewoods, Grattan, Freemans, Kay, and British Mail Order – sold nearly 10 per cent of all clothing and footwear in the UK, a figure yet to be overtaken by internet sales, so the threat of online shopping has a fairly familiar feel. For retailers of big ticket items like furniture, carpets, bedding and electricals, the new competition came from retail parks, which grew rapidly with anchor tenants like B&Q, Comet, Halfords, MFI, Allied Carpets, Homebase and Focus. This development pretty well took these trades off the high street, where we no longer see Cyril Lord Carpets or the Local Electricity Board shops.

Perhaps one of the biggest but least acknowledged changes over the last 50 years has been the steady demise of the traditional markets. There are still several thriving market halls up and down the country. There continues to be a buzz about the busy markets in Swansea and Leeds, but more and more empty stalls are appearing in Abingdon Street market, Blackpool, and the markets in Hereford and Halifax. Many of our major retailers were developed by market stall holders who expanded into a wider world, like Jack Cohen of Tesco and, indeed, Michael Marks of M&S. The market traders are now competing with Primark, Poundland, B&M Bargains and Sports Direct, which can buy and sell at much lower prices.

Retailers looking for new sites, and estate agents trying to sell them, use Goad plans. These maps give a bird’s-eye view of a retail centre, showing the fascia name of every unit on the street. The plans are named after Charles E. Goad, who first produced street plans to help insurance companies assess fire risk. The Goad company, now part of Experian, started producing these shopping plans in 1966 so the earlier editions provide a Who’s Who of the 1960s high street. Some stalwarts have survived, such as W.H. Smith, Boots, M&S and Russell & Bromley, but most have disappeared. The old names are still familiar to my generation but most of today’s shoppers would wonder ‘who was that and what did they do?’ Here are a few names to test your memory: Paige, John Collier, Timothy Whites & Taylors, Dewhurst, Dunns, J Hepworth & Son, Trueform, Our Price, Kardomah, Richard Shops, Rediffusion, Home and Colonial, MacFisheries, Bewlays, Van Allan, Weaver to Wearer, Fine Fare and Liptons. Some of these names were axed following an acquisition. Most of the stores that are now called Debenhams or House of Fraser set off with much more interesting names, like Swan & Edgar or Arding and Hobbs. Greggs and Johnsons were two of the few multiple chains that retained the original names of their takeover targets, so for years you could still trade with Baker’s Oven, Thurstons and Prices. For many years after being bought by Johnsons the Cleaners you could continue to take your suit to Harton Clean, Zernys, Smiths and Pullars of Perth. The only other business I can recall that allowed newly acquired subsidiaries such autonomy was Allied Shoe Repairs, whose chain of shoe repair shops traded as Malones, Paynes, Shoecraft and Modern Shoe Repairs until they were sold in 1985 to Mr Minit, who changed every fascia. Now they are all called Timpson. Others that were rebranded include J Hepworth & Son that became Next, Timothy Whites & Taylors that became Boots, and Tandy that was turned into Carphone Warehouse.

Some businesses catered for a declining market and were eventually bound to fail. The men’s tailoring chains including John Collier and Alexandre Ltd, which almost totally sold to the made-to-measure suit market, never adapting to the demand for ready-to-wear casual fashion. Radio Rentals, Granada and Martin Dawes were businesses born because almost everyone rented their television. Singer had a chain of sewing machine shops when home dressmaking was widespread, and although our weather hasn’t changed, the sales at Kendall Rainwear and their competitor Direct Raincoat suffered when fewer people walked to work or waited at bus stops. Blockbuster could never survive the competition from the internet and films on demand.

Here’s a game you can play to pass the time waiting at an airport or driving down the motorway. Name chains of shops that have disappeared in the last twenty years. There are enough to keep you going for the length of the M1, but I will just give you twenty to start you off: C&A, Littlewoods, Foster Brothers, Woolworths, Phones4U, JJB Sports, Comet, Borders, Zavvi, MFI, Threshers, Past Times, Barratts, La Senza, Adams Childrenswear, Dolcis, Jane Norman, Oddbins, Viyella and Virgin Megastore.

Although retailers who failed to survive all the changes in government policy and our shopping habits often found someone or something else to blame for failure, most of their problems were self-inflicted.

Some years ago a university business school study into family-owned companies found that family firms were an inefficient drain on the economy. On closer inspection this was naive academic nonsense. Nearly every retail company has started as a small family business and there are plenty of examples like Kwik Fit, DFS and Iceland to prove that the family founder can do a much better job than a professional manager. Nor do I, as a fourth-generation cobbler, subscribe to the inevitability of clogs to clogs in three generations. Fenwicks, Russell & Bromley and, for many years, Clarks have shown how to create success by keeping it in the family, but none of these businesses can match Berry Brothers. Founded in 1698 and acquired by the Berry family in the early 1800s, the company is now run by a member of the seventh generation, Simon Berry.

If anyone is surprised that family ownership can create such success, they should read a letter my grandfather wrote to our shops in 1955 when, at the age of 75, he apologised that ‘following my recent illness I feel I will no longer be able to continue my habit of trying to visit every shop during each year. I miss meeting you all and hearing how you would like us to develop your business. It feels like a long time since I met some of you but I was surprised to discover that I have visited over 120 shops in the last twelve months.’ I have discovered that family ownership, in the right hands, is a very helpful management tool.

Several top retailers have found it difficult to pass control to a new management team. M&S and Sainsbury’s in the late 1990s and, more recently, both Tesco and Morrisons have shown that it can be difficult for a new team to develop the strategy and keep the old culture. Perhaps companies can get too big. Burtons was fine until it hit a tough trading period, UDS was certainly too complicated for the management talent available, and the Sears team under Liam Strong was too short of retail experience to run such a wide spread of retail shops.

Woolworths and Littlewoods simply failed to keep up to date and showed the signs left by years of cost control by head office. When we at Timpson owned Sketchley, I particularly remember visiting their shop in London Road, Brighton in 2004, and being told that the only time the shop had been decorated in twenty years was in 1999 when the manager, her husband and their two children tackled the job over a weekend. Head office-controlled cost-cutting went so far at Sketchley that the branch staff were not allowed to pay for window cleaners or buy postage stamps. If they wanted to send a letter they had to order the stamps from head office and the stamps were sent to them in the post.

C. Northcote Parkinson was right. Over time, organisations tend to gather more managers and central management becomes an end in itself. In recent years Tesco has suffered from a bloated head office which dictated policy in detail without being totally in touch with the shops. My guess is that they, and many other big retailers, have had at least two tiers of management too many that spent a lot of their time playing business politics and sitting in meetings designed to use joined-up thinking to agree policy. These organisations will benefit from having fewer executives and more common sense.

When the founding entrepreneur hands the business over to a team of professional managers, there is a danger that the flair that created success is replaced by a complicated process that hopes to keep up the momentum with a set of rules and key performance indicators.

This does not mean that once the company gets into the hands of a new management team it is doomed to failure. There are plenty of examples of inspirational leaders who took on a well-established company and made it better. Ralph Halpern, Terry Leahy, Stuart Rose, Simon Wolfson and Justin King all come into this category, big personalities who put their personal stamp on a big business. These entrepreneurs have made a major contribution to shaping the character of today’s shopping, but you don’t need to have a big business to be called a high street hero. All over the country there are fantastic independents with just one shop: butchers, fashion retailers, farm shops and interior designers that ooze excellence. The big retailers should always be on the lookout for new ideas and they can often be found in small shops that dare to be different. If I ran a deli I would copy Percy Grantham in Alderley Edge, who sets a gold standard for others to follow.

Most of our best known retailers were started by one person opening a market stall or a small shop. M&S, Sainsbury’s, Dixons and Boots were all developed by families that turned a successful shop into a national chain. No list of retail heroes would be complete without including Jesse Boot, Ken Morrison and Simon Marks.

If I look back at those Goad plans, with over 75 per cent of the fascias no longer in business, we must be thankful for all the new retail concepts that have been developed over the last 50 years. Without them our shopping centres would be full of empty units. Anita Roddick, Charles Dunstone, Mike Ashley and Julian Metcalfe have produced The Body Shop, Carphone Warehouse, Sports Direct and Pret a Manger. Most of these ventures seemed unlikely candidates for national success but few can have been given less chance of survival than Ann Summers, which has been driven to success by Jacqueline Gold, and the bluntly named Supercigs chain, started on Wolverhampton market and sold for £530m. For a time Supercigs was owned by Tesco, but not many people know that.

Most new retail ideas face rapid failure. In the 1960s a lot of the little shops selling jeans in expensive sites didn’t last too long, and a number of fashion shops like Miss Attitude followed them into oblivion, but the brilliantly named Manchester fashion store Stolen From Ivor started by selling Levi jeans at £2.7.6d (£2.38) a pair and had customers carrying their ‘Stolen From Ivor’ bags all over Manchester. The chain grew to 43 stores; but the Stockport store is the only one still open for business.

Some ideas didn’t last so long. Most of the fish foot spas disappeared within a couple of years, and I wonder how long specialist e-cigarette shops will be around. But my prize for the shortest lived, unluckiest retail concept goes to a shop in the Westgate Arcade, Peterborough called Just Eggs. It was the age of niche retailing, with plenty of publicity and high share prices being achieved by Tie Rack and Sock Shop. The egg shop sold brown eggs, white eggs and eggs in a range of pastel shades. There were hens’ eggs, duck eggs and quails’ eggs – any sort of eggs you could think of, but nothing else. Four weeks after the shop opened, Edwina Currie made her ministerial announcement about salmonella, demand for eggs dived and within three months Just Eggs had closed.

Some chains just got battered by their opposition. Sports Direct won the battle with JJB Sports by cutting prices and opening next door. Card Factory caused Clinton Cards to go into receivership just by doing a much better job in much smaller shops with much lower rents.

Happily, there are enough growth businesses to keep shopping alive. We are seeing more fast food with Costa, Pret a Manger, Caffè Nero, Patisserie Valerie and Subway. Many are able to expand quickly through franchising, which has helped the growth of one of the big success stories: Specsavers. New fashion formats will continue to emerge in the wake of current favourites Cath Kidston, Jack Wills, AllSaints and Hollister, a shop so dark inside that older people like me can’t see the merchandise.

As you will have gathered from this introduction, the search for my top 50 retail heroes has taken me on an unplanned stroll through 50-plus years of UK shopkeeping, but I didn’t go everywhere and some possible heroes may be miffed that I passed them by. In particular I have left the online retailers for another day, on the basis that most of them have yet to prove that they can make money. When the dot-com bubble burst just after the millennium, I thought that investors had seen sense and would never again value companies on an inflated extrapolation of dreams. But it has happened once more. AO.com floated on 200 times earnings, making a business with sales of £275 million worth an initial listed price of £1.2 billion. Amazon, which has yet to make a profit, has a market capitalisation of $174 billion. The original favourite, lastminute.com, made only a modest profit of £200,000 three years after floating at a market value of £571 million.

It has been suggested that the combined online business done by the big supermarkets creates a loss of £100 million. It can’t be cheap to pick every individual order from the warehouse shelves, and the Tesco driver has to be pretty slick to deliver to enough doors an hour to make home delivery a profitable proposition.

I hope Max Spielmann makes money out of Click and Collect, which I’m pretty sure is the way that Next and John Lewis are making home shopping worthwhile, but I’m not ready to put an e-retailer into my list of heroes. They may well feature on a future list though, alongside some, as yet, totally unknown names, because over half the most successful retailers of 2025 almost certainly have not yet been created.

When I started writing I had no idea how I was going to pick the order of my top 50 retail heroes, so I decided to delay the choice until I had written about all the candidates. By then, I realised I’d been set an almost impossible task. Rating the merits of Jack Cohen against Simon Wolfson or choosing the better of Charles Dunstone and Jesse Boot is as difficult as comparing Jack Hobbs with Ian Botham or Rory Mcllroy with Sam Snead. It might be possible to pick between Ken Morrison and Terry Leahy because they both ran supermarkets at the same time but it isn’t fair to pitch Julian Richer against Ralph Halpern or Terence Conran against Harry Selfridge.

After a lot of anguish I made life easy by taking my top 50 and putting each name on a separate card, which I happily shuffled around for four hours until I felt I had put them in the right order. As I said, the result is at the end of the book. It is up to you whether you want to cheat and look at the list before joining my trip round the world of retail. But perhaps it might be more fun to skip through the book first and then see if you agree with my conclusions.

46 YEARS ON

When people reach my age (I can’t believe I’m 72 already) they often have a distorted view of the past. I was talking to James, my son and chief executive, about how much the high street was changing even before he was born (1971) and I could tell by his quizzical expression that he didn’t believe me. So, to put my memory to the test, I acquired Goad’s street trader plans of Peterborough and Oxford for both 1968 and 2014. The comparison sharpened up my memory and showed that 46 years is a long time on the high street.

Since the Co-op department store in Peterborough was bought by Beales a few years ago, the only fascia that remains on the same premises in the centre of the city is M&S. Every other shop that was trading 47 years ago has been either sold, closed, moved or knocked down to build the Queensgate Centre.

The Peterborough map for 1968 is full of memories. Granada and Radio Rentals recall the days when most televisions were rented. Finlays the tobacconist supplied customers who were allowed to smoke inside the centrally located Odeon and Embassy cinemas. The Singer Sewing Machine shop and Cyril Lord Carpets (‘This is luxury you can afford – by Cyril Lord’) were soon to disappear. Singer Sewing Machine shops were already closing across the country and Cyril Lord collapsed in November 1968 due to, according to a report at the time, ‘the founder Cyril Lord’s unbridled innovation, inadequate product testing, lack of market research and uncontrolled advertising budget’.

There were thirteen shoe shops all well located – Freeman Hardy Willis, Dolcis, Trueform, Hilton, Turners, John Plant, Lotus, Barratts, Bata, Easiephit, Manfield, Briggs and Shoefayre – none of these footwear chains have survived.

Today, retail experts talk about supermarkets moving back into town with their convenience stores. But, in 1968, plenty of food multiples were trading in the middle of Peterborough – David Greig, Lipton, International Stores, Maypole, Fine Fare and George Mason along with MacFisheries and Dewhurst the butcher, owned by the Vestey family.

Tesco is trading in almost the same spot, having moved next door into a property that was previously a garage (the original Tesco building is now a Yates’ Wine Lodge). This store was where we opened our worst Tesco/Timpson concession and it was all my fault. When I inspected the site I was in such a rush I never noticed the two cut-price cobblers on the market nearby. We never had a chance.

The Goad plans don’t just map movements in shopping habits, they also show how society has changed. Across the road from Tesco the premises once used by the WVS are now occupied by Wetherspoons, next door to Quicksilver amusements, which was previously Top Rank Bingo – and no doubt, had the right sort of user clause to allow slot machines into the city centre.

Like most big shopping centres Peterborough had plenty of department stores. Family businesses all with a fascinating history – Sheltons, Fairways, Farrons, Brierleys and Armstrongs. All these names have disappeared, replaced by the John Lewis store, built as part of the Queensgate Centre.

Perhaps the most surprising feature on the old street map was the number of building societies. People in Peterborough had plenty of mutual societies fighting for their business. There was the Anglia Building Society, The Peterborough, Peterborough General, Co-op Permanent, Leeds Permanent, Abbey National, West Bromwich, Bedfordshire and The Bradford and Bingley (whose massive office building was being knocked to the ground when I last visited our Timpson and Max shops in Bingley). Now there are more pay day loan shops than building societies.

Oxford’s shopping streets haven’t changed quite as much. The Post Office still trades from the same site, but probably has a much longer queue, as will almost certainly be the case at W.H. Smith, which occupies the same site but has expanded next door. M&S has moved from Cornmarket to a property formerly occupied by the Co-op on Queen Street. The old M&S site is now split between Next, Fat Face, River Island, Carphone Warehouse and Superdrug. Woolworths has become Gap and Zara, and Littlewoods was demolished in 1983 to create room for The Clarendon Centre. Shortly after my 1968 street plan was printed a few shops disappeared to make way for The Westgate Centre that was built in 1972. The Westgate is due to be completely rebuilt before 2018, showing that even new shopping centres can’t be expected to last more than 50 years.

Boots is now three times the size but still trades on Cornmarket Street where Austin Reed continues to be a neighbour.

I’m pleased to see that The Randolph Hotel and St Michael’s Church have avoided the developers’ bulldozer but just about every other building is home to a different business compared with 47 years ago, apart from the banks. But most banks have changed their name. Today we bank with Santander, HSBC, NatWest, Barclays, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland. In 1968 there was Martins Bank, The Midland, Williams Deacons, Westminster Bank and The National Provincial.

The Southern Gas Showroom and the Southern Electricity Service Shop both occupied big sites where customers paid their weekly and monthly bills. Like the Eastern Gas and Electricity Boards in Peterborough, these shops were Currys’ major competitors.

All the womenswear chains then in Oxford are now extinct – Paige, Peter Richards, Wetherall, Noel Fashions, Kendall Rainwear and Etam. The Oxford public could pick from plenty of multiple tailors – Jackson & Son, John Collier, Foster Brothers, Hector Powe, J Hepworth & Son, Dunns and, the only ones still trading, Burton and Austin Reed. Dunns was founded in 1886 by George Arthur Dunn who started selling hats on the streets of Birmingham and built up a chain of 200 shops simply selling men’s hats. You only have to see pictures of people over 50 years ago to see how a men’s hat shop could make money. Well-dressed men had a hat for every occasion – top hats, a trilby, bowler hats, deerstalkers, pork pie and panama hats, straw hats and flat caps. Dunns diversified into suits, blazers and sports jackets but it remained a business with an old-fashioned image, which remained stuck in the past until it closed down in 1996.

Oxford in 1968 had most of the household names that seemed to be permanent fixtures: Timothy Whites & Taylors, The Scotch Wool Shop, J Lyons, Salisbury’s Handbags and Timpson shoes.

The Timpson shop on Queen Street, together with the shop next door and restaurant above, was part of our company’s freehold portfolio. My grandfather bought the building in the 1930s for about £50,000.

In 1983, when I was trying to do a management buyout, 33–35 Queen Street, Oxford became more important than I’d ever imagined. Most of the funding had to come from selling freeholds and leasing them back. We needed to sell £30m of property to do the deal, the building in Oxford was valued at £3.75m, over 120 times what my grandfather paid and more than 12 per cent of the money I had to raise. We did the deal, which was key to securing the buyout.

Four years later with too many shoe shops on the high street and lots of other shops selling shoes, I found it so difficult to make money I decided to sell our shoe shops. So, in 1987, the Timpson shoe shop on Queen Street, Oxford became Oliver Shoes, which quickly sold the lease. The whole of that site now trades as Miss Selfridge.

When the street map of Oxford was compiled in 1968 I would never have guessed how much shopping would change over the next 46 years and certainly would not have expected Timpson shoes to be one of the earliest names to disappear. We were almost the first shoe chain to sell out; over 90 per cent of the other shoe retailers followed in our footsteps.