Wilko's departure from Sussex imminent: This is when remaining stores will close

Eastbourne’s Sovereign Harbour Wilko store, as well as the branches in Crawley and Bognor Regis, closed on Sunday, September 17.

The remaining Sussex stores will close in the coming weeks.

Closing on Thursday, October 5 are the Wilko stores in: Worthing; Burgess Hill and The Arndale, Eastbourne.

A spokesperson for The Guildbourne Centre – where Wilko’s Worthing store is based – said: “We would like to thank all the Wilko staff and customers for their support over many years. We are sorry to see you go.

“In the meantime, we can report positive interest in the store from five parties and so we are confident that the store will be trading successfully very soon. Watch this space.”

Horsham’s store will serve customers for the final time on Sunday, October 8.

Administrators PwC said they had ‘explored all opportunities to save the business’ but ‘despite extensive efforts’, no significant part of Wilko’s operations can be rescued.

In a statement, the administrators confirmed that all Wilko stores and its two distribution centres will close.

It is anticipated that all stores will close by early October, resulting in redundancies of 9,100 employees.

Edward Williams, joint administrator, said earlier this month: “In the absence of viable offers for the whole business, very sadly store closures and redundancies of team members from those stores are now necessary. The loss of these stores will be felt not only by the team members who served them with such dedication, including through the uncertainty of recent weeks, but also the communities which they have been a part of.

“We are enormously grateful for the support of team members during this difficult period and remain committed to doing all we can to help affected staff, assisting them with processing redundancy claims and working with relevant parties to help secure new employment as quickly as possible.”