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As Walgreens Boots Alliance is sold to Sycamore Partners, Outsider wonders if the UK chain will see a rebirth or just another restructuring?

There’s a corridor at Boots headquarters in Beeston, Nottingham – hidden behind a door of polished African hardwood – where the past seems to echo off the walls. 

The wood for its doors was personally chosen in the 1930s by Jesse Boot’s successors and imported with almost ecclesiastical precision. 

The craftsmanship wasn’t for show. It was part of a broader philosophy: to create not just a business, but a benevolent institution, worthy of its staff and its customers.

As Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) prepares to offload itself into the embrace of private equity house Sycamore Partners, one wonders: what would Jesse make of it now?

Once a pillar of British retail, Boots the Chemists was built on an evangelical belief in health, access, and social mobility. 

Medicine for the masses

John Boot, an agricultural labourer turned herbalist, opened his first shop in Goose Gate, Nottingham, in 1849. His son, Jesse, took that idea and industrialised it, using volume and vertical integration to provide affordable medicine for all. 

Boots manufactured its own remedies, trained its own staff, even ran its own sports and social clubs. For decades, the company was more social mission than high-street brand.

By the 1930s, Boots was doing more than selling health: it was shaping British life. The company employed architects to design striking, functional stores.

The Boots Book-Lover’s Library offered a middlebrow counterweight to elitist publishing. Staff were cared for in a way that prefigured the NHS: free healthcare, subsidised meals, and recreational facilities were the norm, not the exception.

In the 1960s, Boots developed ibuprofen, a breakthrough anti-inflammatory discovered at the company’s Beeston laboratories.

The Beeston site itself is a Grade I–listed Bauhaus inspired industrial temple, with its vast glass curtain walls and stylish clock tower – a monument to the idea that pharmacy, medicine and profit could be made not just efficiently, but beautifully.

Outside a brief 13-year sojourn in American ownership in the interwar period, the company remained proudly British until 2006, when one uniquely British institution was merged with a uniquely European one in the form of Stefano Pessina’s Alliance UniChem. 

Pessina’s Alliance was modern, rapidly expanding and innovative. It was to late 20th century Europe what Jesse Boot was to turn of the 20th century Britain.

Pessina now controlled the largest pharmacy organisation in Europe – and he wasn’t finished.

Two years later, Pessina took the company private with investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) in a highly leveraged deal.

What Jesse Boot started in the late 19th century, Stefano Pessina was going to finish in the early 21st century. In 2014 Walgreen Boots Alliance was formed taking the Boots name, and Alliance, global.

While Boots remained a household name, the chemists part began to feel secondary. A decade of underinvestment left it vulnerable to changing market trends, with Pharmacy2U on one side and discounters on the other.

The rollout of NHS pharmacy services was inconsistent, seemingly obstructed by internal priorities favouring cosmetics and fragrance over core dispensing. Pharmacists suffered ever-growing workloads, stores were left unloved, and supply chain issues mounted. 

The glow of Beeston faded. In some stores, you were lucky to find sticking plasters and paracetamol in stock.

By 2023, WBA had begun quietly shuttering hundreds of Boots stores and the estate shrank from 2,200 to around 1,800. In many towns, Boots’ departure left a yawning health gap.

Yet behind the scenes, pharmacy staff were outperforming expectations: prescription volumes were growing, walk-in flu jabs were booming, and the rollout of contraception and minor illness services kept Boots at the heart of communities.

But the company itself was too enmeshed in WBA’s wider losses. The share price collapsed from over $80 in 2015 to just over $10 in 2024. Boots, though relatively healthy compared to the US arm, was dragged down with the ship.

Rebirth or restructuring?

Now, WBA has accepted a $23.7 billion take-private deal from Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm known for retail turnarounds – and aggressive balance sheet tactics.

Boots could soon find itself spun off, possibly as early as 2026. Will this be a rebirth, or another restructuring in a long chain of reinventions?

There’s still something sacred about walking into a good Boots store. The recognisable layout, the blue signage, old friends. It’s stitched into the fabric of our high streets like few other brands.

Pharmacy in the UK is on the brink of transformation. With GP access strained, pharmacists are stepping in – not just to dispense, but to diagnose, advise, refer, and protect. Boots, if nurtured, could be at the vanguard of that shift.

Yet it will take more than store closures and spreadsheet fixes to make that happen. It will take vision. Investment. Not to mention respect for the pharmacists who kept the lights on during the pandemic, the technicians who dispense nearly one million prescriptions a day, and yes, for the wood-panelled legacy that still whispers through the corridors of Thane Road.

Outsider is a community pharmacy commentator