It was all at the Co-op now!: A hauntology of the Cambridge Co-op.

Adkins Corner is named after a food shop that once occupied the brown corner building at one end of Perne Road in Cambridge. This manifestation was before my time. It pre-dated the building's later  Budgens/Co-op dual occupation. In my mind Adkins exists as proto-supermarket in black and white. A provisional Co-op.

The site has long since been vacated by the Co-op. More recently Budgens has closed along with the remaining shops and offices that had occupied the building. I think there may have been flats on the top floor. News of imminent development of the site sparked the urge to have a look before the development got underway, while the  60s/70s brown corner building atmosphere still existed .

The Co-op and Budgens co-existed next to each other on Adkins Corner while I was growing up. At the time it seemed they had been there forever. My Dad worked at this Co-op when I was small. As I stood and looked across at the site from a vantage point over the road, the 'corner' emanated ghosts of 1970s Co-op. The big cardboard Golden Wonder Crisps mobiles that hung from the ceiling, the (recently revived) blue Co-op logo and old ladies with nanna hair talking of their 'divi'. In our front room, the adverts with their musical sloganing of 'Your Sharing Caring Co-op' or 'It's all at the Co-op now' beamed from the wooden television in the corner, while my Dad counted endless books of blue Co-op stamps on the dining room table and did his 'bookwork'.

As these images drifted through my mind, I saw that had got there too late to see the building in its original (recently dilapidated) state. Work had started and the brown exterior was now white. Possibly clad in something, maybe painted, I coundn't tell. The windows on the first and second floor were now modern, not crittal style. Construction was going on round the back. But the building was at still there and was being renovated rather than demolished to make way for the type of beige/glass  development I'd assumed would replace it.

I had heard rumours that  part of the ground floor would once again be occupied by a Co-op. The rumours were later confirmed, which was nothing of a surprise. In recent years the Co-op has had something of a resurgence in Cambridge, which seems to have coincided with the reinstating of the 70s Co-op logo and a surge in developments mixing flats and ground floor shops, particularly student accomodation. Several new Co-ops have opened as a result. The re-taking of Adkins Corner the latest move in a turf war with Sainsbury's Local and Tesco Express in which the Co-op is currently the dominant player. Budgens, meanwhile, appears to have given up the ghost.

The revived Co-op logo, with added barcode.

I couldn't work out how to get round the back, where the added development is taking place (residential, possibly beige and unaffordable but I've not seen the details). I hung around the 'Corner for a bit. Apart from memories of helping my Dad move boxes of toilet roll in the warehouse when I was about seven years old, the site had deeper reverberations. My Mum also worked for the Co-op, firstly at Mill Road. She met my Dad when she worked briefly at Perne Road. I'm a product of the Cambridge Co-op and Adkins Corner is the earliest physical manifestation of my beginnings.

Growing up, the spectre of the Co-op was never far away. My Dad managed various Co-ops, including  in Cherry Hinton, a place currently lacking one. My mum worked at the Beehive, which was a large Co-op supermarket on the same site as the dairy and the head office. The dairy was only rivalled by Unigate in town. Both sets of milk floats could be seen every morning by those with a propensity to be up early enough. They were parallel to the Ice Cream vans (Walls and Lyons Maid) that came at the other end of the day.  But while the ice cream vans announced their arrival with  unsettling Picture Box theme-like musical accompaniments, the milk floats emitted a subtle low level hum.  Later Home Interiors and Exteriors as well as a garden centre were added to the Beehive Centre making it a sort of proto-retail warehouse development. The various parts all had their own plastic bag design, featuring a white Beehive symbol on a different coloured background. The supermarket orange, interiors brown and garden centre green. The designs were of their time and wouldn't look out of place on Ghost Box record covers.

The Beehive centre was later sold and became a proper retail warehouse development with an Asda flanked by other outlets usually found in these places. A thoroughly depressing area to spend a Saturday afternoon in, but people do, in droves. The Co-op's flagship department store in Burleigh Street closed (now Primark) and  it was last orders at the Co-op Club around this time too. The latter a place of Double Diamond, 'dos', darts, pool and snooker for the staff. The gaffer a sweaty middle aged man with greased back hair who appeared to be permanently pissed. Snooker was played in a creaky room above the mortuary of the Co-op funeral service underneath. These three closures marked a decline in the significance of the Cambridge Co-op.

During this period of retreat, the Co-op abandoned the old logo and changed colour from blue to green.  Somewhat eerily, the telephone box cash machine I encountered standing on Adkins Corner was decorated in a very similar colour scheme, like an artefact belonging to the Co-ops 'green  interregnum'.  A reminder of the period when Co-op shops became places with piped music, more homogenised and reduced product choice, convenience food, tat magazines and later opening hours. My Dad took early retirement soon after this happened. The dalek-like cash machine, with its silver and day glow green covering contrasting with the grey sky,  looked like something beamed in from a motorway service station or out of town shopping development. The very places that contributed to the decline of the sort of town centre shopping the Co-op had offered. An object of sinister liminal dystopianism imposing itself among 1930s pebble-dash of Perne Road.

By contrast, a lush green segment of space sits a few feet away with a green telecoms box at it's centre. I'd never really notced this properly before. The apparent randomness of the presence of ths green oasis between main and side road gave it the aura of a portal to a wider liminal green realm. Coldhams Common perhaps.

Taking a closer look at the Adkins Corner building I noticed the railing along the first floor balcony had been allowed to remain, while the first and second floors were otherwise altered in appearance almost beyond recognition. This concession to the past heightened the sense of the presence of earlier incarnations of the building lurking in the background, hidden behind the new white facade.

I headed up Perne Road. At the next next roundabout is one of the recent Co-ops. One of a small but growing wave to appear in Cambridge following the reintroduction of the old logo. It occupies the ground floor of a new building which replaced it's dilapidated brown predecessor on what is/was known as Pernella's Corner. This was a bit like smaller version of  Adkins Corner.  The original building had housed a newsagent, a hairdressers and the small supermarket/post office (Pernella's) with flats on the first floor, before falling into disrepair and remaining seemingly abandoned for a number of years. This corner provided walking distance services for people in the surrounding area of 1930s pebble dash and post war concrete houses. The included my nanna and grandad (concrete, not pebble dash).  I have vague memories of my grandad taking me to Pernella's in his car despite the proximity of his house 10 minutes walk away. This was an era where people drove somewhere within easy walking distance and then complained when there was nowhere to park. An era that many people still live in.

The current building is a mixture of brown brick (or brick-like cladding at least) superficially similar to that of the one it replaced, combined with the contemporary vogue for excessive glass and matt grey metal-like framing. The old/new blue Co-op logo is prominent, like an apparition from an earlier age thrust forward to the present. The shop inside, like all the others, is more contemporary than the retro symbolism might suggest: self service tills, piped music courtesy of Co-op radio, a heavy bias on ready meals and convenience foods along with fruit and veg wrapped in excessive plastic.

I drifted away from Pernella's corner, heading along the next stretch of 1930s pebble dash semis along Perne Road which was broken only by a handful of side streets and a scout hut, before heading up Mill Road towards home. On the way I passed a Co-op Funeral Services 'shop'. The revamped logo was displayed, this time in black and white. Plastic bags are probably not available in a monochrome version. A bag for death? Maybe not...

Further up I arrived at the Mill Road Co-op where my mum had worked, in a black and white age that pre-dated me. Outside a board advertised a plastic looking hotdog, resembling something transported from the adverts shown Regal cinema circa 1978 to show the wares available in the foyer.  It felt like the barrier between the present and the past(s) was as thin here as it had at Adkins Corner.

The Mill Road Co-op and it's 70s style hotdog board marked the end of my drift. I ruminated on the Co-op retro brand. It marked the announcement that the divi would be brought back when the group is in profit. Meanwile, the members card allows the accumulation of reward that can be set off against future purchases. The branding suggests a uniform organisation but The Co-op Group is still made up of a number of different Co-ops across the UK. I was reminded of this in Norwich recently, when told by the man serving me that I needed a green card, the blue one wasn't valid there. I don't know the geography of the different Co-op groups or how many different coloured cards there are but imagine the zoning resembles something like that of ITV regional television in the 70s. The Co-op has a long history of being community focused and owned by its members (the shoppers), an aspect that the organisation is still keen to emphasize.

The old reintroduced elements mixed with the contempoary have produced something that superficially harks back to the best aspects of an earlier age while simultaneously embracing most of of the dystopianism of modern shopping: the bar codes, the piped music, reward cards and plastic wrapped vegetables along with a homogenaity of layout and product choice rigidly being applied to all shops. The human element personified by self-service tills where you do someone elses job for free and they are rendered of no further use. As I the left the scene it seemed to me that revived Co-op symbolism is hauntological: a vision of a better future that has never quite materialised.