Today Sainsbury’s is a longstanding institution in Bristol, with stores large and small across. the city. Sixty years ago when the first branch opened at Broadmead, it wasn’t just the first Sainsbury’s supermarket in the area, it was their largest self service shop in Britain.
These days it would be dwarfed by every superstore in the land, but when it opened its doors at 33-39 Broadweir on November 14 1961, there was a queue of curious customers who couldn’t wait to get inside and explore this exciting new shopping phenomenon.
Prices were in pounds, shillings and pence, before decimal currency or “new money” came in and one of the special opening offers was Rowntrees jellies, reduced to seven-pence halfpenny - less than 3p.
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Most shoppers - almost all of them were sporting hats or head scarves as would have been the norm back then - used hand baskets to collect their items. The few trolleys available were less than half the size they are now, which is just as well considering the aisles were pretty narrow by today’s standards.
You loaded your own goods onto the checkout counter for the cashier to ring up on the till, where you were most likely to pay in cash, or occasionally by cheque with a banker’s card. There was a friendly packer to help load your groceries very carefully into the string bags, holdalls, baskets or trolleys that you brought with you.
It would have been quite a sight to behold for John James and Mary Ann Sainsbury who opened their first shop at 173 Drury Lane, London in 1869, selling fresh foods and later dry goods like tea and sugar.
Even though they grew the business to 100 stores in the south east by 1903, there’s no doubt the self service supermarket concept would have been an alien one to anyone raised on the age-old tradition of the shopkeeper gathering all the items you wanted for you.
By 1962 Broadmead was blazing a trail again with the first self-service off-licence aisles, and in 1969 a second brand new Sainsbury’s supermarket opened in the city at 12 St Catherine's Place, Bedminster. By then everyone knew what to expect and several other grocery supermarkets had moved onto the patch.
Competitive pricing was the way forward, and in a time capsule advertisement proof for Sainsbury’s stores at Bedminster, Kingswood and Worle back in January 1980, we can see the kind of prices on offer for popular groceries in their Discount ‘80 promotion.
They were selling 18 Shredded Wheat for 35p, 100g of instant coffee powder cost 64p, Heinz salad cream 29.5p, Mr Kipling country slices 28p, sausages 52p per lb, Sunsilk shampoo 38p and Signal toothpaste 23p.
The tipples on special offer from the off licence section included Blanc Anjou wine at £1.43 a bottle, Sainsbury’s own Spanish sherries at £1.68, and four tins of pale ale for 78p.
The original Broadmead supermarket closed in February 1980 and the current Broadmead shop opened 30 years later. The Bedminster shop shut in 1992, but there are still plenty of Sainsbury’s stores of various sizes around the city today.
All these fascinating photos and details come from the Sainsbury Archive , a website documenting the history of the well-loved stores as well as providing a unique record of the huge transformation of grocery shopping since the 1950s. They welcome personal memories and old images of their stores from former staff members and shoppers alike and you can also contact them on Twitter (@sainsburyarch).
Did you work at or were you a customer at the groundbreaking Broadmead store? What do you miss about old-style shopping? We'd love to hear from you in the comments section below.
Check out an intriguing assortment of stories from the past in our Bristol Nostalgia section.
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