BHS revolutionised

AN ICONIC UK high street brand, British Home Stores was a mainstay of Dundee’s Wellgate Centre for more than 30 years before closing in 2016.

Better known as BHS, the department store chain was founded in London in 1928, before expanding across the country in 1933.

While most Dundonians will best remember BHS in the Wellgate, it actually had a brief presence in the city much earlier than the late 1970s.

In the days before the mall, the Wellgate was a traditional thoroughfare in the city centre with a host of charming old shops and tenements.

One of those shops was the New Universal Stores, a three-storey department store which opened at 53-61 Wellgate in 1938.

The commodious shop, designed in the Art Deco style, was built on the site of slum buildings so old that a musketball was found embedded in one of the walls during demolition.

The cutting-edge shop sold everything from ladieswear to sweets, toys, haberdashery goods, hardware, cutlery, rugs and linoleum.

And one of its biggest attractions was an “all-electric cafe bar” on the ground floor with fashionable Terrazzo tiling.

It wasn’t open for long when it was rebranded Hills & Steele Limited after its parent company, and it continued to be the only Scottish store in the chain’s nineproperty portfolio.

Hills & Steele Ltd was bought over by BHS in 1944, and the shops were rebranded – with the exception of the Dundee branch.

Despite being under the ownership of BHS, the name didn’t quite make it to Wellgate as the shop was requisitioned by the government for the war effort.

The popular department store was forced to shut down and the entire fixtures and fittings were sold off at auction; from hosiery legs to the last coat hanger, everything went under the hammer.

With the shop gone, so was British Home Stores’ fleeting presence in Dundee.

Ironically, it wouldn’t be until the whole Wellgate area was demolished in the 1970s and the new £7m Wellgare Centre opened in 1978 that BHS would return to the city.

Tesco was the first retailer to open its doors followed by BHS and Mothercare.

The traditional sandstone buildings had been replaced by a state-of-the-art complex clad in glass and concrete.

And attracting a prestigious brand like BHS to the city was a real coup.

Now Dundee residents could enjoy the one-stop-shop for clothes, household items, fragrance and beauty products without traipsing around town.

BHS was the cutting edge of modern retail in Dundee – the light and bright shop with concessions and a cafeteria helped make shopping a hobby.

As well as its famous lighting displays and occasionwear department, many Dundonians will recall making the annual pilgrimage to BHS during the summer holidays to get kitted out for the new school year.

BHS was also one of the retailers in Dundee that pioneered Sunday openings as an experiment for the summer of 1986.

Still going strong in the 1990s, in the days before e-commerce, the Dundee BHS underwent a big revamp as part of improvements at the Wellgate Centre.

Inspired by the Bon Accord Centre in Aberdeen, the centre was reimagined with larger and loftier mall areas in 1992.

BHS gave up almost all of its extensive area on the first level, instead taking up almost the entire Murraygate end of levels one and two.

The renovation was a bid to attract shoppers back after the departure of Tesco in 1990 which had seen footfall drop.

There was great excitement when the new-look BHS was reopened by Lord Provost McDonald.

The shopping centre’s owners said the improved mall and BHS – its biggest store – would meet shoppers’ increased and “sophisticated” demands.

He added: “We believe Dundee deserves and indeed needs a comparable facility and one

The early 20th Century Wellgate.