MAKING WAY FOR GATEWAY 1987 (1)

by Dave Roberts

At the beginning of March 2012 Cheshire East Council gave the go-ahead for a  much-enlarged Tesco supermarket on the company's existing Middlewich site between Wheelock Street and St Ann's Road and taking in a lot more of the adjacent land between Darlington Street and  Southway, which is currently given over to housing.

It's fair to say that these plans have caused a lot of controversy in the town, with many people saying that the development is far too large and out of keeping with the character of the town centre and others claiming that expansion of shopping facilities in Middlewich is vitally important for the town's survival and that the new store will be a big boost to existing traders in Wheelock Street, who will benefit from the increased numbers of shoppers in the town.

UPDATE(Dec 2014): In the event, all this proved to be useless speculation, as Tesco later withdrew their plans for the giant supermarket, leaving a huge amount of blighted land right in the middle of town, with no indication of what would, or could, be done with it. As at December 2014 nothing seems to have been decided. The existing Tesco store continues to trade, with empty houses and derelict land in the place where the new store was to have been - Ed

We thought now might be an opportune time to look at the area before it was developed as a Supermarket site in the late 1980s, and, quite fortuitously,  Mike Jennings has sent us a wonderful set of photographs taken in 1987, just as work was beginning to transform  an old industrial site into what has become, for better or worse, the hub of Middlewich's shopping facilities.

In the 1980s the site was more or less just a field with F Coupe & Sons' Orchard Works 

and a few other industrial buildings at the top (Southway) end.

The site had long been earmarked as a suitable site for a supermarket and the Co-operative Wholesale Society (Co-op) had submitted plans on several occasions, only to have them rejected by the Middlewich Urban District Council's Planning Committee who 'wanted to protect local traders'.

Eventually the Co-op reached a compromise and built their 'Co-operative Superstore' not on this site but in the Bull Ring.

That 'superstore' (or part of it at least) has, somewhat ironically, now become one of two Tesco Express shops in the town.

This left the Southway site ripe for development and finally, when the 1980s were more than halfway through, the Gateway store and its associated car park were built on the site.

(I have a niggling feeling at the back of my mind that the 'Gateway' brand was used alongside another name at the time, but can find no trace of this anywhere on the internet. Does anyone remember this elusive 'other brand', or am I imagining things?

UPDATE: Having asked umpteen people and drawn a blank, I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably getting confused with the time when Gateway changed its name to Somerfield and the two names were used side by side for a while. But, as Mike Jennings said when he sent the original photos on which this entry is based, and as we've repeated below, many people in Middlewich still use the name 'Gateway' for this supermarket, whatever its official name might be.)

This was the first supermarket ever to open in Middlewich and it made quite an impact - so much so that, even after all these years, many local people still refer to it as 'Gateway', whatever it says on the building itself.

Gateway was beset by financial difficulties in the early 1990s and began a major re-organisation which included re-branding of the company, and all its stores, as 'Somerfields'.

Thus, in 1994, Gateway Middlewich became Somerfields Middlewich.

Fourteen years later, in 2008, The Co-op (ironically) took over Somerfields and, for a short time, it looked like the Co-op Supermarket which should have been built there in the early 1970s was going to become a reality on the Southway site.

It never happened, as the Co-op sold on the site, together with others, to Tesco, beginning that company's association with Middlewich which, like it or not, looks like becoming even stronger in the future.

The Somerfield store became Tesco in 2009, according to the information we have.

Can that really be right? Is it only three years since Tesco took over the site? It certainly seems a lot longer.

The date of this Office of Fair Trading  document seems to confirm the year:

OFT ADJUDICATION 2009

Mike's picture shows what is now the Southway end of the Tesco car park, with the rear of the Alhambra Chinese Restaurant (at that time a bingo hall) to the right. The tall building above it is Barclays Bank. Southway itself is behind the trees on the left.

UPDATE 1st AUGUST 2018): In July 2018 Tesco announced that it's main store in Middlewich would be closing in August, making the existing staff redundant.
After much speculation it transpired that the firm were creating a chain of cut-price, no-frills stores to compete with the likes of Aldi and Lidl. It seems likely that the Middlewich store will become one of these stores, the provisional name for which is 'Jack's', supposedly commemorating one of the firm's founders, Jack Cohen.

SEE ALSO MAKING WAY FOR GATEWAY 1987 (2)

First published 9th March 2012

Updated and re-published 9th March 2018

Updated and re-published 1st August 2018

MAKING WAY FOR GATEWAY 1987 (2)

The second in this series of photos from Mike Jenning's Classic Collection shows another part of what is now Tesco's Car Park, its approximate location indicated, as on so many occasions in our Middlewich Diary, by the tower of St Michael & All Angels Church.
The building of Wallcroft Gardens, which runs down from Tesco's access road to Wheelock Street, along a narrow strip of land adjacent to Fountain Fields, has obscured the view of the church from some angles, but it's still visible if you stand in the right place.
The top part of that little strip of land, for those who don't know, was at one time a children's play area, complete with paddling pool.
This little bit of a former scruffy looking field, with its  long-gone industrial buildings, is now the preserve of motor cars and shopping trolleys.
And soon, if everything goes according to plan, it will all change again.
This picture could be slightly misleading, as it looks like it ought to be the bottom right-hand corner of the present Tesco car park (looking towards Wheelock Street).
Actually it's a few yards higher up, round about where the  wide car park becomes narrower, in front of the current store entrance.
The houses of Wallcroft Gardens would dominate the same shot today.
A recent 'field test' showed that, because of those new houses, the church tower can now only be seen from the upper part of the car park, alongside the store itself.

SEE ALSO: MAKING WAY FOR GATEWAY 1987 (1)

First published 16th March 2012
Re-formatted and re-published 9th March 2018

MAKING WAY FOR GATEWAY (3)

by Dave Roberts

These photographs from the Mike Jennings Classic Collection were originally going to form the basis of a series showing the proposed site of the new Tesco Superstore at the  time when its days as an industrial site were coming to an end, and its new life as part of Middlewich's 'retail sector' were in prospect. 

We've kept them on the back burner for a while as we waited for the situation over the future of the site to be resolved.

For a while it looked very much as though the existing supermarket and its car park were going to be transformed by Tesco into a gigantic 'superstore', with adjacent land on the other side of Southway being given over to a car park to service the new store; the only fly in the ointment as far as Tesco was concerned being plans by Morrisons to build another supermarket in Chester Road.

Eventually, after much controversy, and after Morrisons had built their new store, Tesco announced that the plans had been dropped. 

This appears to have been more as a result of a change of policy nationally than being due to local conditions. 

It's very often forgotten that Fine Fare were the first supermarket group to look at Middlewich. They considered the Southway site as well as the old WMC Motors site (now the home to Lidl) and another site near to Middlewich Town Football Club in Finney's Lane. 

By the time planning permission was obtained for the first  supermarket in Middlewich,the company had become Gateway as explained here, with the Somerfield name being introduced a few years later.

These photographs, together with the ones in the above link and also this one show the area in 1987 as it was when it was on the verge of becoming the site of the  town's first real supermarket.

And it's worth pointing out once again that Middlewich now has three medium sized supermarkets, all within

easy walking distance of each other - something which many towns of this size can only dream of.

The Orchard Works 1987. The long, low and utilitarian building was a sewing factory owned and operated by F Coupe and Sons, who also ran the Lily Works across the road in St Ann's Road (now the site of Newton Court) making clothes for babies and children. Notice that, although the F Coupe & Sons sign has been removed, the yellow Orchard Works sign still remains. Quite possibly the company thought it could re-use a sign saying F Coupe & Sons, whereas the Orchard Works  one was surplus to anyone's requirements.

Here we see the sewing factory in its entirety, looking on helplessly as the mechanical diggers start to prepare the site for a new era. On the extreme left are some derelict industrial buildings which, as far as we know, were never part of the Orchard Works. They appear in this Diary entry and a clue to their origin may lie in the old name for Southway, Tannery Alley. Our old friend the St Michaels Church Tower, which has helped us find our way around many a lost Middlewich location, can be seen peeping over the centre of the building's roof. From most parts of Tesco's car park this is now hidden by Wallcroft Gardens, the housing development which connects Wheelock Street with the road connecting King Edward Street to the other end of the car park (or would, if access was not restricted for the general public).

Whether Mike Jennings had inside information about the actual location of the new supermarket only he can tell us, but in this final shot he managed to pinpoint the site exactly. The buildings in the background are still there, the one on the right being the former home of Trevor Williams the delicatessen owner and his family. The land to the right of this house, between Southway and Darlington Street, with access from Wheelock Street,  was to have been the location of the car park serving the new mammoth Tesco store which would have replaced the existing store and its car park. Notice that the all-enveloping greenery which is now such a feature of Middlewich has not yet begun to flourish.

The closest we can get to a present day comparison is the photo below, taken on the 10th July 2013.

The buildings in Mike's 1987 photo are hiding behind Tesco as it basks in the warm Middlewich July sunshine, and those insignificant looking trees in front of the Williams house are soaring to great heights on the other side of Southway.
Tesco seems to dominate the scene but, it must be said, to a far lesser degree than it would have had its plans for Middlewich come to fruition.

As a reminder of what might have been, here's the company's explanatory diagram one more time.

As a public relations exercise it was a disaster, because it brought home to local people for the first time just how gigantic the proposed store and its car park would have been.
In the event, as explained above, the plans were dropped, to a great extent because of a re-think by Tesco on its policy of building massive stores all over the country.
Now Tesco Middlewich is just another supermarket competing for our trade with Morrison's and Lidl.
The demolition of property owned by the company in Wheelock Street and Darlington Street has gone ahead (delayed, seemingly, by the need to remove asbestos from the buildings) and it remains to be seen what happens to that huge area, right in the middle of our town, where the new car park was to have been.

SEE ALSO: BROKEN DREAMS
                     ORCHARD WORKS 1972