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Does anyone remember a shop which sold painting and decorating items as well as timber called Peerless? Were they a national thing, or perhaps Nottingham or East Midlands only (in which case, not many people on here would know what I am going on about)?
I have just seen a YouTube clip of old pictures of Nottingham City Centre where there are some pictures of local shops from around Christmas 1981 as illustrated - one picture shows a shop called "Peerless Homece…" (I think that the second word is Homecentre [sic], although the edge of the picture cuts the wording off). In the window it shows items like timber, paint and wallpaper for sale, so I assume that it was a compact version of B&Q or Do-it-All - perhaps one of them actually took over the company? I often confused the building with the British Gas showroom which was the next one along, and had closed a couple of years ago.
I don't remember the shop being there at all, and it must have closed a year or two later, but I know that it became either a Moben (with an umlaut over the O which is what I cannot seem to do on my computer keyboard), or a Sharps furniture place, before Argos took it over in 1991 and it became the catalogue store's second Nottingham branch, as well as Nottingham's first "Superstore" Argos, (the first one was in Broad Marsh which opened in 1976 and closed in 2018, leaving the Lower Parliament Street branch the only Nottingham City Centre one for the first time in 27 years). It is now where Nottingham City Centre's Argos store is, in order to pinpoint its location - a family member of mine was a founding staff member at that Argos and was there for its first year.
I looked on online newspaper websites to see if the daily tabloids had featured advertising from any company called Peerless in the late 1970s and early 1980s but found nothing - it mostly picked up political stuff such as the House of Lords as one could imagine. However, one or two Schreiber adverts might have mentioned them in the small print, although I didn't have time to look through the newspaper archives with a fine toothcomb.
I know that the DIY boom of the early 1980s had helped small companies like that to be successful on the High Street, and then they disappeared from view by the mid 1980s and were probably gobbled up by the bigger companies - I believe that what happened eventually.
So, does anyone remember Peerless - were they national, or was the Lower Parliament Street branch the store's only branch back in 1981? I think we should be told...
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