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A newfangled Gateshead Supermarket in 1962 - but what's there today?

In the early 1960s, people saw the conept of supermarkets arrive across the UK and Tyneside as new stores opened in every town

Law's supermarket, Low Fell, Gateshead, September 1962

Turn the clock back 55 years and Frank Ifield's I Remember You sat at the top of the UK singles chart.

But how many residents of Low Fell in Gateshead can remember Law's stores on the busy Durham Road?

The photograph above was taken in early September, 1962.

Supermarkets, as we'd recognise them today, saw the light of day in the United States where the first self-service stores opened in 1916.

The concept arrived in the UK in 1950 with SAinsbury's opening a self-service outlet in Croydon.

Here, across the North East, supermarkets began to open by the basketful in the early 1960s.

The Co-op store in Low Fell, Gateshead, September 2017

In Low Fell, soon after Law's began trading, nearby Fine Fare opened their doors in May 1963, in a grand ceremony presided over the popular DJ and TV personality David Jacobs.

As for Law's, thw store has had a number of incarnations since it opened at the dawn of the "swinging 60s".

Today it's a Co-op store.

But one resident recalls: "Beside Laws, it's been a WIlliam Low store; Shoprite - a Scottish company in the 1990s which includhed high security and shoplifting warnings everywhere which shocked Low Fellers; as well as Kwiksave and, just before the Co-op, Somerfield."


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