ONE of the best-known and most respected business names from Southampton’s past is making a return to the city centre.

For more than a century Tyrrell and Green – usually referred to as just Tyrrells – was the city’s most famous department store.

Next year the name is due to return to Above Bar as the name of a new restaurant in the city’s cultural quarter, overlooking Guildhall Square on the site once occupied by the much-loved shop.

The new venue is a partnership between Nuffield Southampton Theatres (NST) and fast-growing local coffee shop chain Mettricks.

Tyrrells will sit alongside the new performing arts venue, NST City – a 450-seat main theatre and 133-seat studio which will also have screening facilities, workshop and rehearsal spaces.

The new venue will run in tandem with the existing Nuffield Theatre – now known as NST Campus – at the university in Highfield.

Spencer Bowman, founder and managing director of Mettricks Hospitality, said: “As a proudly local hospitality business with a real commitment to quality, hospitality and our city community, I feel a very real responsibility to live up to the famous Tyrrells name.

“We aspire to create one of our city’s landmark restaurants and bars befitting the location – as well as bringing Mettricks speciality coffee.”

He said Tyrrells would specialise locally-sourced food and drinks and would be open seven days a week.

Mettricks already has four coffee shops in in the city and this is not the first time Spencer has revived an old name – he recently opened Vospers, a burger restaurant in Woolston, recalling the Vosper Thornycroft shipyard.

Sam Hodges, NST director, said: “Reconnecting communities with the rich heritage of this city is very important to us as storytellers and theatre-makers. The launch of Tyrrells on the original site of one of Southampton’s landmark institutions from the past as part of what we hope will be one of its landmark institutions of the future feels absolutely right.”

Originally opened in 1897 by Mr Reginald Tyrrell and Mr William Green, Tyrell and Green was a draper, milliners, ladies’ and children’s outfitters.

It was an instant success, moving to a new premise in Above Bar Street the following year, where it continued to expand.

In 1934 the store was bought by the John Lewis Partnership, but the name Tyrrell and Green lived on.

During the Second World War, it was destroyed in a bombing raid and shop and staff transferred to Winchester, where it remained for the next 15 years before returning to Southampton.

In 2000, the store moved to the Westquay under its new name John Lewis Southampton.