Greaves Sports was where you went for football boots. Or a new strip. Golf clubs. A tennis racket. To pick up elusive items you needed for a ski trip to the Cairngorms.
For generations of Glaswegians, the shop at 23 Gordon Street was part of a trip into the city centre
Before European football shirts became ubiquitous, this is where you would go to search for the cool tops worn by your favourite cult hero. Borussia Dortmund, PSV Eindhoven, Fiorentina, Benfica.
Closing down signs have appeared at the Gordon Street store following the sale of the business to Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group earlier this year. It is understood Greaves will cease trading on 4 January.
The closure will end a Glasgow retail story which stretches back 96 years.
Greaves can trace its history back to the Clydesdale Rubber Company in 1930. Back then the stock included Wellington boots and sheepskin coats.
Change came in the 1950s when brothers Jim and Bill Greaves moved the family business towards sport. In 1959 they bought rival Lumley’s, doubling their presence in Glasgow. The Greaves Sports name arrived in 1967.
Lumley’s brings another strand of Glasgow retail history into the story.
The Greaves family continued to operate the old Lumley’s shop on Sauchiehall Street alongside Gordon Street. For years there were two familiar destinations in town for sports equipment before the Sauchiehall Street branch eventually closed.
At one point, the business operated the Gordon Street and Sauchiehall Street stores, a Nike outlet in Buchanan Galleries and the Scottish Rugby shop at Murrayfield. Five generations of the Greaves family were involved in running the company.
By this summer, Gordon Street was the sole remaining Greaves store.
It was a proper multi-sports shop. Football used to be its own subterranean world downstairs. There was golf, running, rugby, tennis.
As rival sports retailers moved further towards leisurewear and fashionable trainers, Greaves continued to sell equipment and specialist services. You could have a racket restrung, your running gait analysed or golf clubs custom fitted.
You could browse, ask questions, try things on and talk to somebody who knew the difference between one pair of boots and another. This is a rare experience in modern retail.
Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra visited for golf clubs in the 1950s. Much later, Samuel L Jackson and Eminem were among the customers who made their way into Gordon Street.
The number of Glasgow people who can remember exactly what they bought there is remarkable.
In an online discussion about Greaves, customers recalled finding Dortmund shirts during the club’s Champions League era and Italian kits at the height of Football Italia on Channel 4. Another remembers buying a PSV shirt with Ronaldo’s number nine on the back.
The business changed with the times. The shop expanded its football department, developed online retail and invested £1 million in a House of Adidas department in Gordon Street in 2016.
Greaves survived longer than most of the sports shops people remember from Glasgow shopping trips over the decades.
Frasers Group acquired the business and assets this summer, ending the Greaves family’s long period of ownership. The Gordon Street shop initially continued under the familiar name.
Three months later, the closing down sale signs appeared.
There are bigger shops in Glasgow and there are more places to buy trainers and football shirts. What disappears with Greaves is a shop you went into town for.