Talk: Sainsbury’s – a Family, a Grocer and a Social History since 1869

Price including glass of wine or soft drink.

In 1869, John and Mary Sainsbury opened their first shop in Drury Lane, which was then one of London’s poorest areas, selling butter, milk and eggs. At a time of dubious safety practices, their objective was “to sell the best butter in the world” with an insistence on high quality and standards, combined with keenly competitive pricing.

Since those humble beginnings, Sainsbury’s has grown into one of our largest and most successful retailers with 23 million customers every week, 150,000 colleagues and a product range of tens of thousands of items. Yet the imperative of providing great quality food at fair prices remains as central to the company’s culture today as it was to John and Mary.

Tim Fallowfield OBE was born in Amersham in 1963 and some of his earliest memories are of his Mum taking him shopping in the Sainsbury’s counter shop at 5 Chiltern Parade, Sycamore Rd, which had opened in 1937. In 2001 Tim joined Sainsbury’s as General Counsel and Company Secretary and was a Board Director for 20 years until his retirement in 2024.

Tim became Chair of the Sainsbury Archive on his retirement, having been one of the founding trustees when it was established as a charity in 2003. The Archive’s Collection is one of the leading business archives, not only plotting the history of the company and grocery retailing, but also providing an absorbing social history of Britain since Victorian times. More than 100,000 items have been digitised on the Archive’s website( www.sainsburyarchive.org.uk).

In this talk, Tim will weave these elements together, and will explain how the Archive has worked together with the London Museum as it prepared for the opening of the new museum in the historic Smithfields Meat Market in November 2026.

Notes

The talk will be in the Museum’s Woodcock Room which on the first floor, accessed by a platform lift. There is more information about accessibility in our access statement here. Please get in touch with any queries about accessibility, or any requirements that we might need to know about to make your visit as straightforward as possible.

Please make sure you have checked details before ordering tickets. It is necessary for the museum to charge a cancellation fee of £1 to cover credit card and administration costs.