Shopping parades

Sites for new stores were carefully chosen, with a central position in a parade selected in preference to a corner shop.

John James Sainsbury had pronounced that 'corners are for banks.' Shops within a row were easier to keep cool and clean than corner sites, which had more windows and tended to collect dust from vehicles as they turned the corner.

During the 1930s whole new shopping parades were built by Sainsbury’s own  development company, Cheyne Investments Ltd. Parades were built at Kenton, Wembley, Ruislip and Haywards Heath with the aim of providing ‘a complete market’ of complementary businesses. Sainsbury’s advertised its store at Windmill Hill, Enfield alongside the adjacent Waigh Brothers greengrocers and Delforce Brothers fishmongers as ‘three good shops all in a row’.

Chiltern Parade in Amersham was built by Sainsbury’s in 1937.  Sainsbury’s occupied the central shop, while others were occupied by a newsagent’s a shoe shop, a greengrocer’s a gentlemen’s outfitters a branch of Boots and a milliners.

The interwar period was a time of great building enterprise and other developers knew that a Sainsbury’s shop in their parade would attract other traders. John Benjamin Sainsbury took an active role in choosing sites for new Sainsbury store.  He took his family to look for sites in greenfield areas at weekends and visited potential new locations to make sure they were busy enough.

It would sometimes take years to find the perfect location for a new store, but once a location had been found the design and building work was undertaken quickly. Sometimes the building of shops was so rapid that designs for different locations were ‘twinned’, as in the shopping parades at Morden and Gerrards Cross.