Avid Offaly collector rescues remnants of iconic Tullamore store

SOME of Tullamore's modern retail heritage has been rescued thanks to local man Barry Clarke.

Barry managed to salvage two surviving letters from the multi-storey Texas department store which was demolished recently.

He has also kept one of the last till receipts from the shop, dated July 31, 2007, along with one step from an escalator and a couple of red bricks from the building's facade.

“My sons and I were always fascinated with the building, with the store. It was always something that appealed to us,” said Barry.

“We came to have a liking for it and when we learned of the fact it was going to be taken down and that no part of the building was going to be kept and I just thought that if these were gone there would be nothing to remember it by.”

As pieces of urban infrastructure, he likened the Texas letters to the Anna Livia fountain sculpture which was placed in Dublin's O'Connell Street to mark the millennium.

Mocked by many as the 'Floozie in the Jacuzzi' the feature was nonetheless loved by others and there was a mixed reaction when it was eventually taken away from the street.

“I wouldn't put [the letters] on the same level as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi but by the same token when she was moved people were really missing her. She was important. They're not quite on that level but I think every time we take away something and it's done away with, we've lost something.”

Barry also noted how people still refer to the Offaly Street and Kilbride Street areas of Tullamore town centre as “near Texas” more than 15 years after Tom McNamara's iconic shop shut down.

Barry has also learned that the escalator in Texas was Tullamore's first so he was delighted to be given one of its steps before the rest went for metal recycling.

Looking at the escalator step he said: “Most of Tullamore would have walked on that. That's the only one, the rest of them were all crushed.”

Barry is a keen collector and his home is full of miscellaneous heirlooms. However, he explained that rescuing the Texas items was especially personal for him.

In 1998, while living in London, he saw the planned demolition of a 10-storey building at Tower Place near the Tower of London.

The owners of the building also owned the lease of the World Trade Centre and three years later, its twin towers were destroyed in the al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

The cut-price Texas retailer was located in a former grain store for DE Williams and after its closure the site was earmarked by a developer for a major mixed use project which never got off the ground.

It was subsequently bought by local developer Tony Flanagan and an Aldi supermarket will be built on the site which was fully cleared in the last few weeks.