New Year closure, Market Way

Image: © E Gammie Taken: 5 Jan 2009

The Woolworths in Market Way is closed and has a few staff in taking down the last of the fixtures and fittings. A major casualty of the recession of 2008, Woolworths closed all 807 of its UK stores with the loss of about 27,000 jobs at the end of the year. A long established high street name, the first store opened in Liverpool in 1909 and early stores sold goods at 2 prices: 3d (1¼p) and 6d (2½p). Woolworths has occupied this building since it was built in the post WW2 reconstruction of Coventry city centre in the 1950s. F W Woolworth & Co. Ltd, as it then was, occupied most of the building from Coventry Point to the Lower Precinct, with the main entrance facing onto the Lower Precinct. A couple of small stores occupied space facing Market Way. The store had a basement and ground floor the length of the building and a gallery cafeteria at one end. It sold a broad variety of cheap household goods, food, clothing, toys, makeup and, famously, pick-n-mix sweets. In the 1980s, the store suffered a downturn in trade and reduced its occupancy of the building to the market end basement, ground floor and gallery cafeteria. More recently it reduced further by closing the basement and became a mere shadow of its former self before the final nail of administration was hammered home. Before WW2 the store occupied a site in Smithford Street which was bombed during the war and built over during post-war reconstruction.

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