Store Highlight: Coldhams Lane, Cambridge
Sainsbury’s has had a branch in the centre of Cambridge since 1925. But by the early 1970s the company was keen to complement it with an ‘edge of town’ supermarket. The difficulty of obtaining planning permission to build stores in town centres had already led Sainsbury’s to open large supermarkets in the new towns of Bretton and Telford. The Coldhams Lane site, on the eastern edge of Cambridge, would be the first on the outskirts of an established city.
To show how this type of development would benefit customers, Sainsbury’s invited representatives of local authority planning departments to ‘Retail Store Location in the 1970s’, a two-day seminar held in Cambridge in September 1972. Cambridge City Council nonetheless rejected the initial planning application for Coldhams Lane, but an appeal was successful. The Sainsbury’s staff magazine ‘JS Journal’ reported that ‘delight’ followed this ‘important’ outcome:
The new store would open on 3 December 1974. An advertising campaign told customers to expect a supermarket twice the size of the central Cambridge branch but with the usual Sainsbury’s quality and value.
To ensure ‘a rip-roaring start’ at Coldhams Lane, Sainsbury’s provided a ‘one week effective teamwork course for the whole management team, held at an hotel far away from the pressures of branch life’.
On the opening day chairman John Davan Sainsbury and MP Jim Prior welcomed shoppers. Mr Prior had recently been Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and was ‘an advocate of out-of-town shopping centres’.
Within minutes the new store was extremely busy and long queues formed outside. Many customers simply wanted to see it for themselves, and some wanted to get ahead with their Christmas shopping. There were national shortages of certain staple foods at the time, so ‘bread-hunters and sugar-seekers’ contributed to the high footfall as well.
Inside ‘was a riot of people, noise and excitement’. The first day’s sales exceeded the forecast by 150%.
When it opened Coldhams Lane was Sainsbury’s fourth largest branch, with a sales area of 2217 square metres (nearly 24,000 square feet) and 24 checkouts.
The clothing department alone was 186 square metres (2000 square feet), a third larger than the company’s previous biggest.
The size of the new store allowed Sainsbury’s to experiment with a wide selection of other non-food products it had not sold before, including electrical goods, kitchenware, household linens, cosmetics, stationery, and even gardening and DIY tools.
Besides the new ranges Coldhams Lane had features we expect to find in large supermarkets today, such as a customer information desk.
Next to the main store there was a separate freezer centre selling a huge variety of frozen foods.
Although Coldhams Lane was not the first branch with its own car park, free and convenient surface-level parking for hundreds of cars was a key aspect of ‘edge of town’ stores. Coldhams Lane had spaces for 376 cars, all of which were filled within a few minutes on the opening day.
The store’s architecture was a ‘new style’ for Sainsbury’s, featuring ‘a long high wall of glass, providing customers with a covered walkway between the shop front and the car park. Huge cubes like stalactites hang from the ceiling of the walkway, the base of each cube glowing with coloured light.’
Less striking, but nonetheless important, was a ‘small discreet brick building’ housing the company’s first ever customer toilets.
The petrol station at Coldhams Lane was another first for Sainsbury’s. It was supposed to open at the same time as the store itself, but delays in the manufacturing of the pumps pushed it back to 10 January 1975. There were 6 pumps dispensing ‘unbranded’ petrol at 68p a gallon, a ‘super-super-save’ compared to local competitors. Customers could pay without leaving their cars thanks to a drive-in kiosk, but they sometimes faced a ‘10-minute wait’ as the electronic payment system struggled to keep up with the high demand.
Sainsbury’s quickly deemed the Coldhams Lane store a great success and redoubled its efforts to build ‘edge of town’ supermarkets in other places. It even provided a day trip to the store for a group of nearly 50 women from St Albans so they would boost public support for a planning application there. This campaign was ‘the first of its kind ever launched by the company’.
In 1988 the store’s sales area was significantly enlarged and various ‘large-scale alterations’ were made. Throughout its five decades of trading the staff of Coldhams Lane have also raised large sums of money for charity.
If you would like to share your memories of working or shopping at Coldhams Lane please head over to our Memories page.
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