RESEARCHING the words for a piece about the opening of Worcester Co-operative Society’s flagship building in St Nicholas Street in 1968, I came across a nugget of town planning that has rather slipped under the radar in recent years.

This redevelopment of the city centre site involved the demolition of several well-known properties, among them the old Masonic Hall and the Gas Board offices, in a Victorian block also bounded by Queen Street, The Trinity and Trinity Street.

But then the archive story by former colleague Mike Grundy suddenly got interesting. It read: “The new store will be three storeys high and will be the first in Worcester to have its own rooftop car park.”

Woah! What’s all that about? A rooftop car park? This is not LA. However, this innovative idea was reliant on the city council building a multi-storey car park on land between Silver Street and Queen Street.

The car park and store would then be linked by an overhead road.

Mike went on: “To make these far sighted arrangements possible, the new store will obviously have to be of extra sturdy construction in order to withstand the weight of dozens of parked cars and also the rooftop road.

“Councillor Harry Vandermolen, chairman of the city’s town planning committee, has, of course, already envisaged the day when many of Worcester’s stores will be linked by a rooftop-level road enabling customers to drive  along, park on top and then go down to do their shopping.”

Needless to say, although the Co-op building rose from the rubble to become a landmark site in Worcester, the rest of the rooftop road scheme never happened.

Trinity House, a it was known, opened on Friday, September 20, 1968 and one of the victims of its arrival was the demolition of the old Co-op Hall, a regular gig for the hundred or so beat groups that populated Worcester in the Sixties.

Along with the Catholic Hall in Lowesmoor it was a “main place” after a volume limit was put on the Guildhall and Shirehall.

Worcester Co-operative Society was originally formed in November 1880 because of the local price of bread, kept high by a bakers and millers price fixing policy.

The average worker’s wage at that time was around 14 shillings a week (about 70p in today’s coinage) but the cost of a single loaf was seven pence, nearly 12 per cent of the take-home pay.

It was James Manning, a local joiner by trade, who set the ball rolling and inspired by a similar successful movement in Gloucester, gained public support for a co-operative baking house in Mealcheapen Street.

That was just the start and the Co-op ethos and its famous “divvy” discount and saving scheme grew to become one of the most popular forms of shopping, especially during the shortages after the Second World.

In Worcester, as well as a large bakery in Newtown Road, there was also a dairy with two dairy herds (at Kempsey and Oldbury, St John’s) and the Co-op had its own building department, which built the £330,000 Trinity House – but without a rooftop car park.