It survived partition, the Troubles and the Covid-19 pandemic, but after 110 years McLaughlin’s Hardware in Derry is up for sale.
Brothers and co-owners Liam, Dessie and Seamus McLaughlin are retiring and hope the building can be sold as a going concern.
“It’s going well,” says Seamus. “We have lovely customers, they’ve supported us and we’ve supported them.
“You’d build up a good rapport with them and you’d know them all on a one-to-one basis, and that comes down the generations. Granny used to come in here and you’d see subsequent generations are still using the shop, and that’s good.”
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Founded by their grandfather, James McLaughlin, and his business partner Bobby O’Donnell, McLaughlin’s has been on William Street – on the edge of the city’s Bogside – since 1913. Old photographs on display inside show a shopfront much like that of today, with everything from keys and yard brushes to kitchen utensils piled up in the window.
Back then, McLaughlin’s also sold items such as sweets and cigarettes. Seamus and Dessie recall one childhood Christmas when their father, Michael, brought a wholesale box of dolly mixtures home from the shop.
“They were all congealed together because they’d got damp in transit,” Seamus says.
The shop’s location put McLaughlin’s on the front line of the Troubles. The end of the street was known as “Aggro Corner” because of the riots, and the horror of Bloody Sunday unfolded “just round the corner”.
Between 1969 and 1978, the shop survived one bomb and four fires, even operating for a time from a temporary office and then a prefab after the building was destroyed.
“They saw some tough times, but some good times too; I always remember my father and my uncle Jim saying, ‘You know, people were so good’, and they saw us through the bad times, the customers, because they were so loyal,” says Seamus.
“Both my mother and my aunt Lily, Jim’s wife, died during that period, so to keep going, there was a family of six and a family of five and their business was falling about them.
“My father said, ‘We had to keep going. We didn’t know anything else’.”
Since the 1980s, the three brothers have run the business.
“And we don’t fight,” laughs Dessie.
“Three’s a great number,” says Seamus, “because whatever two say, goes.”
Today, a museum on the first floor pays tribute to McLaughlin’s history. There are photographs of their grandfather and his family as well as of the bomb-damaged shop, a British army vehicle parked in the rubble-strewn street outside; alongside them are artefacts and products of yesteryear such as giant bunches of keys, a Singer sewing machine, and one of the earliest hairdryers.
In 2013, a play by Oscar-nominated playwright Dave Duggan was staged in the shop to mark its 100th birthday.
“There are plenty of memories,” says Dessie.
Though he is looking forward to retirement, he says “when it comes to finalising and walking out that door and pulling the shutters down, it might be something else”.
“It will probably be hard to get used to not getting up in the morning and not coming up to William Street, or coming up and driving past and somebody else standing behind the counter.”
As for what they plan to do with their time, “my wife’s writing out a big list for me, I know that”, says Seamus.
They will miss the customers. “It’s a community,” Seamus says. “We’ve had people coming in and saying they’re devastated – I’d a couple of ladies in with tears in their eyes.
“It would be lovely to see it continue. That’s what we hope for.”
