Anyone heard of Southern Cross Garages LTD, Market Deeping ?

[cjhillman]

Oct 25, 2018 3:35:30 GMT edwardbear said:

I live in Deeping st James next to Market Deeping. Over the years a couple of ford garages have been there. There was one in the centre of the town which is now an American diner called iron horse and another where there is a new coop

Just checked out the Iron Horse.. looks to be on the same road and within the shops on the high street. I'm guessing this might have been more high end cars? If I can find some old news paper adverts Ill probably know from the car adverts then.
Shame I cant get a window sticker made for it but it's cool to know some history about it .

[cjhillman]

Last week i tracked down the remaining garage of the two address on the cars numberplate. Luckily the address says "old southern cross garages" on google maps as in pervious posts and i was passing after picking up a Dash for my Capri. A guy at the garage told me how the plot was originally bigger and they must have sold cars to the side of where i'd pulled in. He said they had been there for 13 years and before then it was only an MOT station so maybe it went out of business not long after my car was sold. He also said the previous owner had passed away so no more leads there. Even though I think my car was sold from the Market Deeping Southern Cross garages its still interesting though!



Heres a photo from the garage in the 70s


Also came across this Capri which had sold from the garage and still had its original plates! Wish i could have bought this one !!

[im55]

So,just come across this thread.
I don't know much about the Potters Bar site, but the Market Deeping one is familiar. The site was originally an Austin franchise run by Bill Todd in the 50's and 60's. He also had the site on the opposite side of the road which was a petrol station.

When he sold out, the northern site became Southern Cross Garages and was eventually appointed as  a Ford retail dealer (as opposed to a Main Dealer) - they drew their new car stock from their main dealer who at the time was Jessups in Stamford (now T C Harrison) - Ford are the only manufacturer to still operate a two tier dealer network. So yes, small dealers like these did sell brand new cars. Your car looks as if it was new in the early 80's - this was at a time when Ford had a market share in the UK of over 30% !!! , so it wasn't difficult to be successful back then.

(Jessups themselves took over in Stamford from Alexanders in 1978 who had taken over from Motors and Tractors in the late 60's)  

Southern Cross vacated the premises around 1985-6 and the Ford retail dealer became Wheels of Deeping . When that closed, the site was bought by Terry Wright Cycles.

Hope that little bit of history helps!!
Cheers.

[cjhillman]

Jul 28, 2020 10:48:01 GMT im55 said:

So,just come across this thread.
I don't know much about the Potters Bar site, but the Market Deeping one is familiar. The site was originally an Austin franchise run by Bill Todd in the 50's and 60's. He also had the site on the opposite side of the road which was a petrol station.

When he sold out, the northern site became Southern Cross Garages and was eventually appointed as  a Ford retail dealer (as opposed to a Main Dealer) - they drew their new car stock from their main dealer who at the time was Jessups in Stamford (now T C Harrison) - Ford are the only manufacturer to still operate a two tier dealer network. So yes, small dealers like these did sell brand new cars. Your car looks as if it was new in the early 80's - this was at a time when Ford had a market share in the UK of over 30% !!! , so it wasn't difficult to be successful back then.

(Jessups themselves took over in Stamford from Alexanders in 1978 who had taken over from Motors and Tractors in the late 60's)  

Southern Cross vacated the premises around 1985-6 and the Ford retail dealer became Wheels of Deeping . When that closed, the site was bought by Terry Wright Cycles.

Hope that little bit of history helps!!
Cheers.

Thanks so much for this information mate!! Its interesting to know as i've seen pics of the petrol station and did wonder if it was related. Its interesting about the two tier system too! So would the main dealer register the car and send it to the retail dealer I guess? just thinking my Cars reg ends in MFL so I guess it would still come from the Peterborough area anyway.

My Car is an 85' so must have been one of the last sold from there if they went under around 85-86. I actually spent some time looking up the records to the business with out any success last year as I thought it would give me a few pointers. I'll look up wheels of Deeping too.
I'd love to find some old merch (if there was any) from the franchise or at least to find some pictures of the site and anything related. I tried to see if they Potters Bar franchise had anything but they mentioned the owners had died and it had changed hands twice already.  I wonder if they had a dealer sticker importantly??? That would be great for my Car.

Hoping I can get a pic of the Car on the old site in the future. Not sure when i'll be traveling that way at the moment though. The little bit of history really does help! if you hear any more, I'm all ears!

[cjhillman]

I finely made it to the old 'Southern Cross Garages' in Market Deeping. I was traveling up to Skegness with some time to kill so made a short detour to whats now a Co-op. It was strange driving in (unfortunately not in the Escort) thinking that someone could have bought my Car new here in 1985 with all the excitement of picking up a new mk3 Escort 36 years ago.

I still hope that I can find more info/ pictures of the Garage one day. I havent done any digging for a while but fingers crossed In the new year maybe I can find more info. My Escort needs a bit of work before I can start driving long journeys again but once its sorted I'll have to get that forecourt photo.

[cjhillman]

Just as I'm going to get some new numberplates made for my Escort, I thought I would have a look into the dealership once again, mainly in the hope I could find a logo for a window sticker.

After a load of nothing online I signed up to the British Newspaper Archive where I could see some thumbnails of adverts. £14 later and this is what I found...















In this one you can see Todds Garage as well as Southern Cross. After 1985 it just comes up with Todds garage (logo a picture of black Cat) and Wheels of Deeping comes up a year or so later in 1987




I'm guessing if they did do window stickers this is what it would look like. Maybe in Blue and White?



One interesting thing about Southern Cross is the site seemed to specialise in Hire Vehicles. I'm wondering if mine would have been a rental car briefly then sold off as I guess thats why they did cheaper cars?

I'll keep digging on the BNA site but I think I've found all I can regarding the Garages at the moment. Thought you might like to see this sweep bigman1207 & im55