Change is afoot at John Lewis in Glasgow. Is it a sign of better things to come, asks Mark Smith

It’s not easy when you see your life – or a large chunk of it anyway – being torn apart by bulldozers and cranes and crushers. I spent 20 years at The Herald’s old offices on Renfield Street in Glasgow so it was a bit of shock to see the building being demolished the other day. Up there, where the tangled strips of steel are, is the spot where our desks used to be. I send a picture of it to an old colleague. “Wreckage of my career,” he says.

He says something else as well that sticks with me, about how short the life of a modern building is. The Renfield Street office is less than 30 years old, but that’s the way it is now: many modern buildings are put up with the expectation they’ll be taken down again in 25 years or thereabouts and so it has proved with The Herald building. Surrounded as it is by some fine examples of Georgian and Victorian Glasgow, it does feel wasteful, reckless, wrong.

But I walk down the road a bit and there it is again: the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre, opened 27 years ago, which in retail years is 107. There were plans recently to pull the place down and start again, and it almost happened, but we’re now getting a redevelopment and ‘modernisation’ instead that’ll start in the summer. Meet me here in 20 years to see it happening all over again.

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And what about John Lewis? Same story. It also opened 27 years ago as part of the Buchanan Galleries, and people queued to get in to see something so new and so up-to-date, but it’s now judged so old and so out-of-date and is about to get a refurbishment. Apparently it will apply to every area of the store and will continue until 2027 as part of a renewal project across the John Lewis estate of 36 stores. Cost: £800million. I’m wondering, as the high street decays and declines, what it tells us.

But first: me and John Lewis. I know this’ll make me sound like an irritating middle-class-hole (or more of one) but my love for the store runs deep. Almost any grave emergency – the need for chinos, the need for an egg poacher, the need for an organic fruit scone – sends me speeding to John Lewis. I grieved when the Aberdeen branch, in that extraordinary brutalist wig-wam on George Street, closed in 2021 (with eight other UK branches) and as other department stores have departed, my affection – and concern – for John Lewis has only increased.

The concern has been well-placed, I think, because the signs of trouble have been around for a while. There were the store closures for a start, including big ones like Sheffield which is still lying empty five years on. There were the years of losses, the failure to pay the famous annual bonus to workers (or partners), the lack of pay rises, the time they dropped the “never knowingly undersold” slogan – all of it clues to a household name’s fragile status. It became not entirely unfair to think that John Lewis might go the way of other department stores, doomed by the people who shop with their fingers on screens rather than their feet on pavements.

More recently though, the signs have been more mixed, with some little shoots of hope. For example, John Lewis did a sale-and-leaseback of some of their Waitrose stores in 2024 to raise capital, but now there’s talk of them buying some of the stores back. John Lewis has also returned to profit more recently, although the management are still warning, quite rightly, that consumer confidence is subdued. One other little sign of hope: the ‘never knowingly undersold’ slogan is back.

The former Herald offices in Renfield Street

What also appears to be happening is a fresh focus on the retail brands, including the refurbishment of the stores, after some talk of diversification. You may remember that in 2020 John Lewis announced plans to get into the build-to-rent market by building houses on 20 sites they own across the country. But they’ve now announced, in the last few days, that the plan’s been dropped. "Our rental property ambition was based on a very different financial environment,” said their spokesman. “One with more stable investment returns, lower borrowing costs, and more affordable costs to build homes."

This is fair comment: higher borrowing and building costs, as well as higher staff costs, and more regulation, have made property development a much trickier investment than it was and in John Lewis’s case just not worth the effort any more. Higher staff costs and more regulation have also been factors in the chain’s flickering profits: John Lewis has specifically blamed the new Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR, basically a packaging tax that requires companies to cover the cost for collecting, recycling and disposing of any packaging it produces. John Lewis has also been hit, like other firms, with the higher employer national insurance payments, which is adding millions to their annual costs.

All of this makes life harder for John Lewis when life is hard enough due to the changing retail landscape, but the way the plates have been shifting leaves a bit of an opportunity. The crisis on the high street has been bad, brutal, for department stores but it does also mean most of John Lewis’s competitors are gone, leaving only really John Lewis to provide the sort of hang-out that does chinos and egg poachers and organic fruit scones. M&S, even Waterstone’s, have proved that the combination of quality products and good food and drink is a strategy for survival; there was a time when some were predicting their demise.

Perhaps it will work, perhaps it won’t, but it’s certainly looking better for John Lewis than it was five years ago, even two years ago. It could be that stores like this one won’t survive, it could be that everything on the high street - or everything except barbers and bookies - will be reduced to the screen in your hand. But the middle-aged, and the middle-class, and the middle-aged middle-class, poor things, must have somewhere to go in these difficult times. And one of the only somewheres left is John Lewis. Long may the bulldozers and cranes and crushers be kept at bay. Long live John Lewis.

Mark Smith is a Herald columnist and feature writer

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