Changing face of Uxbridge
DEPARTMENT STORE’S 60S EXTENSION DEMOLISHED BUT FACADE WILL SURVIVE
PICTURES show the scale of the demolition work at Uxbridge’s famous Randalls department store.
The legendary local store ran for an unbroken chain of 123 years before its owner, the then MP of Uxbridge John Randall, decided to close the store in 2015. Prior to that, the store had stood through two world wars and watched Uxbridge grow from a small town outside London to a major urban centre in London.
As a result of that expansion, Randalls’ glorious art deco building was expanded in the 1960s, creating a vast space to display the store’s huge collections.
But that extension has now been demolished, as pictures taken from above the tall cordons around the site reveal the extent of the work being carried out.
Randalls featured in Goodbye Christopher Robin, a movie set in the 1930s heyday of the store and based on the Winnie the Pooh books starring Margot Robbie.
The film shot as the store lay vacant, before plans for a part commercial and part residential development were approved in April 2017.
What will Randalls become? Developers submitted the plan with three residential blocks, as tall as six storeys, in place of the store’s 1960s extension, which has now been taken down. Also demolished were the caretaker’s flat and the warehouses used through the store’s illustrious history.
The Old Fire Station building also on the Vine Street site is being converted into duplex apartments.
The independent family-run store’s iconic shop front is being preserved as a feature of Uxbridge town centre’s history, and the ground floor will have shops and offices.
The redevelopment is not the biggest in Uxbridge, creating 58 homes and 750 sqm of retail space, but was very sensitive given the history of the store and town and the fact that most Uxonians had memories of shopping there.
The Iland Homes scheme was one of many proposed, but won out over the others, being voted in unanimously.