Shop Talk

I leave the office with a spring in my step. The weather is unseasonably good and mushy peas are in the offing at Goose Fair later on. In the meantime, I have decided to make my way homeward via a route that pays homage to the local history of one of the country's great retail survivors - W H Smith.

Nottingham Midland railway station - site of Nottingham's first W H Smith bookstall - seems an appropriate place to start my W H Smith safari. The most recent branch here, situated in the main booking hall, closed a few years ago and is now a ticket office, which is itself under threat of closure.

21st century life takes no prisoners.

Anyone hoping to let the train take the strain today is out of luck. Due to industrial action, there are no services running. To add insult to injury, BBC News tells me that those annoying Conservatives have just announced the axing of the Manchester leg of the HS2 high-speed railway.

Carrington Street, though, is on its uppers, and there are books aplenty in evidence as I pass by the new Central Library. It's scheduled to open 'towards the end of this year'. Fingers crossed. It's been a while.

The newly liberated walking route between Carrington Street and Lister Gate has yet to lose its novelty and leads me to 38 Lister Gate - occupied most recently by a frequently deserted W H Smith store which closed in 2021.

Lister Gate will reawaken in time. For now, there's a decent amount of human activity as I make my way up its tree-lined slope.

Smith's can trace its origins back to 1792, when Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna opened a news shop in London. Henry died a few months later, but the business carried on, and first became known as W H Smith in 1828, after Henry and Anna's son William Henry had become its driving force. It became a public company in 1949.

W H Smith's website claims that it was the first retail chain in the world. That's as maybe, but with more than 1,700 stores in over 30 countries, it is certainly refusing to go away quietly.

38 Lister Gate wasn't the first W H Smith store hereabouts. Many will remember the huge premises at nos. 14-16 (currently occupied by New Look), which opened in 1977. According to a newspaper report from that year, the store had, at the time of its opening, 124 full and part-time staff, which seems incredible given that there rarely seemed to be more than one or two in evidence at no. 38.

I proceed from Lister Gate into Albert Street, and from there onto Wheeler Gate. The predecessor of 14-16 Lister Gate opened here in 1969 at nos. 6-10 (currently a somewhat ramshackle branch of Poundland). It was said at the time to have the largest individual departments of any W H Smith store.

Source: Guardian Journal, 5 September 1969

I was interested to read somewhere that this branch had a 'water feature' at the top of its escalators. A little research revealed this to have been an 'animated rain feature' called the Wonderfall.

Source: Guardian Journal, 5 September 1969

Leaving the glory days of W H Smith in Nottingham behind, I start to make my way towards the top end of the city centre.

The Market Square is vibrant, but Clumber Street is the undisputed king of hustle and bustle. Chuggers are chugging, buskers are busking, beggars are begging, everyone is getting in the way of everyone else, and delivery cyclists are weaving annoyingly (but impressively) through the assembled throng. Not a place to dawdle.

After I've negotiated the most suicidally-jaywalked pedestrian crossing in Nottingham, an amble along Milton Street brings me to the clock tower, which links back to another former W H Smith presence in the city - its stall at Nottingham Victoria railway station.

There's one more port of call on this whistle-stop tour, and to make it, I must enter the Fourth Circle of Hell - otherwise known as the Victoria Centre.

An Evening Post Victoria Centre Supplement dated 15 March 1973 mentions W H Smith's 'superb new shop at 124-126 Victoria Centre, Nottingham'. Superb is not a description I would use today, but I dare say it may have been worthy (or seemed so) of such an epithet at the time.

I wander inside and purchase the latest issue of my favourite magazine.

Old habits die hard.