The death of the department store
In June last year, the staff of Sheffield’s John Lewis department store began the sad task known as “de-rigging”: clearing shelves and boxing up goods to be sent for sale elsewhere. The city-centre store had been shut since the start of the year, and in March 2021, the John Lewis Partnership had announced that it intended to close the store for good.
Some employees said they were too distraught to take part in all the packing-up. But others volunteered to participate, wanting to bid farewell to their colleagues and the building some of them had worked in for decades. There was a lot of reminiscing, as well as an undercurrent of anger: “tears and laughter in equal measure,” one former employee told me. Some people took away souvenirs, including the store directories that had sat next to escalators and staircases.
In the store’s restaurant, a signwriter had painted: “We no longer have our store but we will always have the memories.” The surrounding wall was soon full of photographs arranged in the shape of a heart, and expressions of gratitude and sadness: “I walked in these doors on my first day, turned round, had been here 23 years”; “For 19 years I’ve been here looking after you and you looked after me – that’s what families do”. T-shirts were handed out, reading: “John Lewis Sheffield: Sept 1963-June 2021”. By September, after three months of work, the store’s five floors were empty, and a story that had run for 58 years apparently reached its end.
When I visited two months later, the building was shuttered and silent. Every ground-floor window was covered by pastel-coloured posters advertising John Lewis’s “virtual events” and click-and-collect services. No one needed any persuasion to talk about the closure. “It’s as
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