In June last year, the staff of Sheffield’s John Lewis department store began the sad task known as “de-rigging”: clearing shelves and boxing up goods to be sent for sale elsewhere. The city-centre store had been shut since the start of the year, and in March 2021, the John Lewis Partnership had announced that it intended to close the store for good.
Some employees said they were too distraught to take part in all the packing-up. But others volunteered to participate, wanting to bid farewell to their colleagues and the building some of them had worked in for decades. There was a lot of reminiscing, as well as an undercurrent of anger: “tears and laughter in equal measure,” one former employee told me. Some people took away souvenirs, including the store directories that had sat next to escalators and staircases.
In the store’s restaurant, a signwriter had painted: “We no longer have our store but we will always have the memories.” The surrounding wall was soon full of photographs arranged in the shape of a heart, and expressions of gratitude and sadness: “I walked…
