On finding Mr Hanburys forgotten shopping bag ...... tales from a Chorlton supermarket

Now a little bit of our collective past bounced across my screen in the form of an old shopping bag from Hanburys.

A treasure from Hanburys, date unknown

It was sent over by Catherine Brownhill who found it in the attic, adding, “Look what turned up amongst a pile of old photos whilst having a COVID-19 loft clear out”.

For those who don’t know, Hanburys was the supermarket which occupied what until recently was the Co-op store on Barlow Moor Road.

Now, I liked Hannburys.

It was a no-nonsense place, which dispensed with elegance, and panache for branded goods sold a little cheaper than elsewhere.

At Christmas its loyalty card was just that ……. a tiny piece of card which was stamped every time you shopped there during the months of December.

And like Kingy across the road it was viewed with affection by those who shopped there, and on a busy day there might be a few who remembered when the building had been our first purpose-built cinema.

The cinema, 1928

It opened in the May of  1914, as the  Palais de Luxe, changing its name to the Palace around 1946, and closed in 1957.

After which the building was owned by Radio Rentals, and then sometime before 1969 it was taken over by Tesco and traded as such, until 1974.

This I know because of a reference in the planning records which record “Continuance of use of radio and television service centre as supermarket”.*

Now given that it was already trading as a Tesco store, I think this might have been the moment when it was sold on to Hanburys, which was a chain of stores across the north which had its origins, when Jeremiah Hanbury opened a small store in 1889 in Market Street, Farnworth, selling butter and bacon.

Forty years later the business was bought by Bolton wholesale grocers E.H. Steele Ltd, and in 1997 the 31 Hanbury’s stores in the north west were acquired by United Norwest Co-op.**

There will be those who are sniffy at featuring a shopping bag from a lost supermarket, but it is history, and what is more it may have been one of those bags which Hanburys started giving away in that short period when we were profligate with plastic bags.

And here I need some help, because I am trying to remember whether Hanburys followed the practice of Safeway and offered you big brown paper bags, which were sturdy but came without handles.

The empty building, 2019

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Hanburys shopping bag, courtesy of Catherine Brownhill, the closed Co-op store, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the Palais De Luxe cinema, circa 1928, Charles Ireland, GD10-07-04-6-13-01 courtesy of East Dunbartonshire Archives 

*Manchester City Council Planning Portal, https://pa.manchester.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?keyVal=ZZZZZZBCXT638&activeTab=summary

**List of supermarket chains in the UK, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_the_United_Kingdom