This brings back memories..Would love to own one now!

Never seen them

Extremely heavy! I picked one up when I was 12 that was in the basement of the estate agent that my mum was working in at the time. Very common in Woolies and Tesco until the mid 80s

yes, i'm sure they converted the 4 tube fittings to 2 tube set ups in the 1980's, as i can certainly remember our tesco having the grey siders in standard looking twins, wonder where they got the cover plates from though that much later on? it must have been a cobble up altering the gear too

on launch these were seen as the future, modern , sleek and energy saving, well if you think about it at 340 watts per fitting, and more for gear losses they would have cost a fortune to run if you had fittings end on end as they did in these large shops

I was thinking about the power consumpion last night in some locations they might have been better off with twin 125w. I remember in Safeway they did remove 2 tubes in each fitting over the checkouts as ths ceiling was lower and was far to bright you needed your sun glasses when you walked in LOL

I can just about remember these in the CO-OP when my mum used to take me there when I was about 4 or 5 years old. It was there I got my first interest in lamps. I can still clearly remember watching the EOL lamps dimly flicker away with nice 4 inch socks at the ends. I think it is quite odd that not one collector I know of has such a fitting in their collection when there were hundreds of these in every town back in the day.

I so much wish i had grabbed that fitting in the basement but it was so heavy, it would need to be transported home by car and i could see my mum not being too happy some how.

yes, i as a kid in the early 80's remember loads of tubes in the tesco fittings nearly out, dimmly flickering, they had 4 foot twin grey sided atlas fittings in the front window, wish i'd made the effort in the mid 90's to get these when the shop closed and was stripped out internally for conversion.

thinking about it, i'm sure some big coop department stores had multy tube fittings, and we had a Timothy Whites which was a deprtment store selling everything, that had multy tube fittings too