Page 406 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Story of the C.W.S.
practical, serious, and warm-hearted. Alike in its virtues and its
shortcomings, it affords many contra^sts with that, say, which is more
famihar in London of the wealthy.
At Newcastle, equally robust in its healthy provincialism, no
important warehouse and office extensions have been necessitated
since the opening of the towering West Blandford Street block in
1899 (the ultimate outcome of the purchase of land in 1890) and the
rebuilding of the drapery warehouse referred to in Chapter XXIII.
Here, also, a new hall was provided for the Quarterly Meetings, the
Northern delegates obtaining an earlier release than their fellows at
Manchester. The first Quarterly Meeting in the new " magnificent
and gorgeously-furnished room " was held in June of that year.
Their escape from a crowded dining-room (at Waterloo Street),
suffocating in summer and chilHng in v.inter, was effected in 1899.
Mr. Tv/eddeU at this time was exiled by illness, and Mr. T. E. Shotton
welcomed the representatives. The new building, he said, had
resulted in the clerks being freed from " a very meagre, poor, and
iU-ventilated office; " while the grocery and provision departments
already had benefited, and the boot and shoe departments were
moving in. Land adjoining this block has since been acquired,
ready for possible needs. And, in addition to the old-existing
Waterloo and Thornton Street drapery and furnishing premises, an
imports warehouse on the Quayside was built by the C.W.S. in
1902. The latter had the distinction of being the first considerable
ferro-concrete building erected in England.
The metropolis, of recent years, with the extended importance
of the co-operative societies working inwards and outwards from
Edmonton, Woolwich, Stratford, Bromley, Penge, and the regions
of West London beyond Brompton and Bayswater, and with the
enlarged C.W.S. premises waUing-in both sides of Leman Street,
has become less of a despair to co-operators. It is even a city of
hope and promise, its co-operation, wholesale and retail, frankly
ambitious of out-rivaUing the magnitude of the North. Here the
lengthening of the line of warehouses already noted did not give a
new hall to the Quarterly Meetings, but, as already remarked, it
restored to them their previous assembly-room, their exclusion
from which, especially dm'ing the special meeting to decide the
constitution of the Committee, in 1906, sometimes was more than
an inconvenience.
The new Manchester premises, as shown in the second frontis-
piece of this book, were erected by the C.W.S. o^ti building
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