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Grand venue for new supermarket

David Appleton
15/10/2005

AS MOST folk are all too well aware, the days of the old corner shop, selling everything from paraffin to Pontefract cakes, is sadly a thing of the past.

Supermarkets now rule - and with their giant buying power it's not hard to fathom out why.

But for many years Rochdale had staunchly resisted the trend.

True, Yorkshire Street and Drake Street had their share of well known stores - names like Littlewood, F W Woolworth and Marks & Spencer - but generally that was it.

Local women - and they were mainly housewives doing the shopping 30 or 20 years ago - preferred to scour the stalls of the indoor and outdoor markets, dropping into the 'posh' stores just now and again when a particular item was not available on the market or at the corner shop.

It was not until the early 1970s that Rochdale got its first real supermarket, Asda Queens which opened on the site in Castleton, once a mill yard and now occupied by a large car sales company.

And it wasn't long before other supermarkets began to make their presence felt.

Tesco had acquired land at Sudden, formerly owned by Higham's Mill, opening its Rochdale store a few years after Asda had moved into Castleton.

By the early 80s Rochdale's shopping habits had changed beyond all recognition. The old market betwen Toad Lane and Yorkshire Street had gone - demolished in a pile of rubble to make way for the new, air-conditioned, all-weather indoor market and Co-op store.

Supermarket shopping - because of its convenience and range of goods on offer, all under the same roof (not to mention the cheaper prices) - was all the rage.

It even went as far as one councillor suggesting, quite seriously records show, that the Town Hall, one of the country's showpiece buildings, would have a better life as a superstore.

Kevin Hunt said the Town Hall, an edifice of grand Victorian architecture, built in the classic neo-Gothic style of the period, should be converted into a giant supermarket.

His reasoning was that it was better to convert it for the benefit of Rochdale shoppers than spend £389,000 repairing it.

He said the building contained little office space and had been built as a 'bastion for capitalism.'

Why should the ratepayers of Rochdale be saddled with a £389,000 debt just to 'tart up up the hallowed portals of a huge mausoleum', he asked.

He didn't get his way though. He was attacked by the Conservatives who accused the Labour party of denigrating the 'civic pride' of the town.

Today, of course, the Town Hall remains the centrepiece of a town centre regarded as one of the most attractive in the whole of England.

But if some councillors had had their way a quarter of a century ago the building would now echo to the sound of checkout desks, be overrun by supermarket trolleys, and sport the name of Tesco or Asda, as the Observer montage of the time depicted.