Weary shoppers in 1931 could revive themselves at this American-style refreshment bar in Woolworth’s on Northumberland Street. There’d never been anything like it in Newcastle.
F.W. Woolworth opened their first store in the city on Northumberland Street in 1913, but they outgrew the building. It was demolished and replaced with one twice the size, reopening on February 7th 1931. The design of the new refreshment bar echoed the company’s magnificent art deco headquarters in New York; customers at Woolies in Newcastle would have only seen its like in Hollywood movies.
It proved so successful that a second refreshment bar was installed in their Clayton Street store a few months later when those premises were enlarged. This store had opened three years previously in a building on the north side of the street; they remained there until 1960 when they built a new store directly opposite it, the one most people will remember today.
Woolworth’s had a presence in almost every town and city, with around 25 stores across the north east of England. But the brand had become tired and old fashioned by the end of the twentieth century. The Northumberland Street branch closed down in 1984 and the one on Clayton Street was part of a mass closure in 2008 across the country, which pretty much finished off the company in the UK.
It’s not known what happened to the refreshment bars, or how long they lasted, but it’s likely they also fell victim to changing fashions many years ago.
Photo credit: Tyne Bridge Publishing.