Battered from pillar to post in the late 20th Century, this hugely influential civic society with 83,000 members in 1990 merged itself out of existenc

The demise of the once mighty Cambridge and District Co-operative Society – Lost Cambridge

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2024-09-21 15:00:20

Battered from pillar to post in the late 20th Century, this hugely influential civic society with 83,000 members in 1990 merged itself out of existence as it folded into the national CRS Co-op after year-on-year losses throughout the 1980s and unsustainable debts

The fate of the Cambridge & District Co-operative Society has fascinated me for years. It was one of the most prominent civic societies in modern Cambridge’s history, with something like 20% of the town having become members by the middle of the interwar period. So how did such a huge institution seemingly vanish from thin air? Mike Petty MBE scanned and digitised this article from 25 April 1990 that explains the immediate crisis that the society faced.

Author and librarian Mary Burgess of the Cambridgeshire Collection told me that the society invested everything in the Beehive Centre, over-extended itself, and lost everything. That, in a nutshell is what happened.

There’s a Ph.D thesis waiting to be written about the founding, growth, peak, demise, and legacy of the Cambridge and District Co-operative Society. Just not by me – I don’t have what it takes to research and produce a work of that level of scholarship!