#oldfrontage

JD Sports

Logo date: 1980 - 2005

Location: St Mark’s, Lincoln; Town Square, Basildon & West 12 Shopping Centre, Shepherd's Bush

Back in the 90s and early-00s there seemed to be a wealth of chain sports stores across the UK. Piled high with team kits and trainers, inevitably with a poster of Michael Owen in the window, every High Street, retail park and shopping centre had one, if not numerous competing branches. But alas not all could survive. Gone are all:sports, First Sports, Sports Soccer, JJB and Giles Sports, all hoovered up when they fell on hard times, leaving just two still going: JD and Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct. 

There’s something about the JD logo still visible with the Lincoln store that almost takes you back to simpler times. A Saturday spent in town with your mates or your mum treating you to that pair of trainers you’d been after. I wanted to preserve these logos, not just because next year will be fifteen years since their replacement, but also because it’s incredibly rare to see this number of variations of one logo. There was a different colour scheme for each department within JD and a specific ‘King of Trainers’ logo too. Take a look...

Above: light boxes for different departments within the Lincoln store; King of Trainers sign from the store within West 12 Shopping Centre, Shepherd's Bush

Top: logo variants seen above windows of the Lincoln store

Bottom row: JD store, Town Square, Basildon displaying a lovely horizontal variant on the logo (May '19) just before the chain relocated to a new branch

Kwik Save, Skegness (August 2018)

Logo date: 2002-2007, chain administration 2007

Is this the only surviving old style Kwik Save store in the country? Quite possibly. Never the most loved of the supermarket chains, the slow rise of the German discounters in the 00s made it seem a little lacklustre and old-hat in the modern age. A merger with Somerfield in the late 90s didn’t prove fruitful for either company with Somerfield divesting of the business in 2006, having kept the best stores for themselves and rebranding them. This left Kwik Save as a standalone firm in poor, unprofitable locations… and it didn’t last another eighteen months.

The inside of this store is very eerie and apocalyptic, as seen in these photos. Those were taken in 2017 following a fire that severely damaged part of the building’s structure. 

The Kwik-Save brand was relaunched in 2012 as a convenience store franchise.