Looking round a thread that Alf linked one day I found this page with pictures of Callers, a store that used to be on Northumberland Street. Only a few days before, I’d stopped to look at the clock outside Haymarket Metro station and noticed that it was put there by ‘Callers the home of good furnishings’.
If you click through to this page and scroll about halfway down you’ll see the clock outside Marks and Spencers on Northumberland Street as it originally was. Thanks to Alf for making me take notice of this little bit of history.
visits
since April 2006.
Callers was a great store, one of the “famous” NEWCASTLE stores, along with ‘Fenwicks’ and ‘Mawson Swann & Morgan’ and ‘Farnons. Shops that everyone identified with Newcastle, and you knew they would ALWAYS BE THERE, all your life.
Sadly not!
You can read a lot about CALLERS here . . .
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=982536
Peter - that’s exactly the same page as I have linked above - great minds!
Isn’t it strange that the main business closed in the 80s but the offshoot - Callers Pegasus has survived. I don’t know how many stores they had in total but I can remember their furniture store on Wallsend High Street in the late 70s and early 80s. When I googled Callers most of the hits were about cold callers, funny old thing the internet.
I love the juxtoposition of modern clock (well it was back then) and my beloved ‘copper nob’
Ta Beth
My main memory of Callers is that they had a great record department - second only to JG WIndows.
Ha ha . . . Sorry Beth, I hadn’t read what you had written properly, so I hadn’t realised you had read my ‘Callers’ post on Skyscraper City already!! The Callers post was the first post on a new thread (at the time) called “Remembering HISTORIC NEWCASTLE - Old Photos, Maps, even Stories” which has turned out to be one of our most popular threads on the Newcastle Forum of SSC.
That first post itself (on ‘Callers’) I have been back to amend and expand so many times since, as I have come across new information and photos etc.
I remember, sadly, standing there with my mate (he had taken us down in his Dads car) and watching that fire in December that year.
The new Callers was very good, but ‘not quite’ as good as the one burnt down.
It is such a shame it eventually closed, a real ICON of Newcastle shopping, no longer there.
Glad you showed the ‘Callers Clock’ on here Beth, it is a nice reminder still there in the City Centre today!
Regards,
Peter (aka Newcastle Historian).
Ah the memories… but I never knew that clock was a gift from Callers.
What a great store - anyone remember their record department too? I used to go in the mid- to late-seventies, and buy a single or two on a Saturday - for about 75p each.
Sorry - I see PJF remembers that record dept too! It was a good one.
Dave - that was my era too. I had a Saturday job in town close to Callers and used to spend lunchtimes looking at the albums there.