IN 1903, The Northern Echo hailed the opening of the latest “large and commodious” premises belonging to the grandly-named Bishop Auckland Industrial Co-operative Flour & Provision Society.

The premises were on “the principal thoroughfare” in Coundon, near Bishop Auckland. “They are the largest buildings in the village and will supply a long-felt want,” said the Echo.

The buildings still stand and are now a decorating centre, and must still be among the largest in this former mining village.

The co-op was formed in a schoolroom in Shildon on February 25, 1860. A meeting of working men had a simple idea: to club together to buy provisions, to sell them at a fair price, and to share out the profits. Within a couple of months, 118 people had joined up and the first shop had opened in South Church Lane in Bishop Auckland.

In 1861, the co-op was established in Newgate Street in Bishop in what, over the decades, grew into a landmark store. In fact, as the co-op spread across south Durham, its properties in most towns and villages became landmarks, both in terms of size and also their centrality to the life of a mining community.

By the turn of the century, the Bishop co-op had branches in Tudhoe Grange, Spennymoor, Butterknowle, Ferryhill Station, Evenwood, Dean Bank, Chilton, Byers Green, Close House and Hunwick.

With more than 16,000 members, it was one of the largest co-ops in the north, and it didn’t limit itself just to shops. From its earliest days it has its own bakery and slaughterhouse; from 1898, it even had its own tobacco factory, in Durham Street, Bishop Auckland, which employed 11 people who created £280-worth of weed a week which brought in an annual profit of £1,800.

“No venture on behalf of the management has repaid them better than this,” noted a co-op report in 1910.

The Bishop co-op even built 150 houses to rent to working families. The names of some of these streets, like Co-operative Street in Shildon, betray their origins, but less obviously in places like Bishop Auckland and Dean Bank, there are streets that bear the names of men on the co-operative committee: Kellett, Raine, Hutchinson, May, Owen, Holyoake, Neale, Blandford…

Coundon was an obvious place for the co-op to reach with its tentacles. Coundon had commenced as an agricultural centre – its name, Cunadun, means “hill of cows” – but had flourished in the railway era once it was reached by the Chilton branchline of the Clarence Railway in 1835. Its population in 1801 had been 163; by 1871 it was 3,513; by 1911, it was 6,912. No wonder the co-op wanted a piece of this action.

In 1890, it bought a paddock belonging to Sir William Eden, of Windlestone Hall, for £1,500, and for a further £3,801, it built the store that was ready for opening on April 24, 1903.

The “esteemed and genial” treasurer, James Davison, a pitman from Auckland Park, performed the honours with “a neat and characteristic address”.

He was assisted by secretary Thomas Readshaw, who had started as a leadminer in Cumbria before coming to Shildon to mine coal. He rose to be master wasteman at the Adelaide Colliery until he lost his job in the strike of 1892 and turned to the co-op.

Also present was general secretary Henry Kellett, who is a giant figure in the co-op’s history. His career down Shincliffe Colliery finished after seven years in 1872 when he was badly injured in an accident. Forced to work in a shop, he was the inspiration behind much of the co-op’s late 19th Century expansion.

The Coundon branch had all you could possibly need: upstairs was drapery, millinery and boots; downstairs was grocery and butchery. The slaughterhouse was at the rear and next to it was a field – now a recreation ground – where the animals arrived after being walked from the fields and where they awaited their final curtain.

The shop served its community until 1967 and then it was a storehouse until it was bought by Frank Johnson in 1985. Frank had many business lines, including a wallpaper stall on markets from Stockton to Wallsend, and his mother-in-law, Eileen Brownbridge, had started work in the Coundon co-op cash office from when she left school at 15.

The cash office was connected to the front counter by a pneumatic tube – such wonderful things figure in many people’s earliest retail memories. The counter assistant would put the customer’s cash and invoice into a capsule, pop it into the pneumatic tube and compressed air would whoosh it around the store to the cash office. There, Eileen would open the capsule, record the sale, put in the correct change and whoosh back to the counter.

There are many advantages to internet shopping, but none of them can match the magic of a pneumatic tube whizzing at headheight around a department store.

Anyway, Frank and his wife, Susan, established the Wear Valley Decorating Centre in the Coundon co-op, and gradually restored the building to something like its original glory.

It contained four large Brazilian mahogany counters – one they gave to Beamish Museum with other co-op curios, two were shipped to the US but the final one retains pride of place in the store.

“It’s not the perfect location or layout, because it has got so many nooks and crannies, but it is a beautiful building,” says Helen Johnson, Susan and Frank’s daughter who now runs the decorating centre. “We’ve kept it traditional and people seem to like shopping here.”

Not that it is totally traditional: Helen’s just launched a new website, decoratingcentreonline.co.uk, and so the 1903 Coundon co-op has made it into the 21st Century.