With WH Smith's name set to disappear from the high street, LAURA CRAIK writes a love letter to the stores that are no more
All bosses are intimidating, and never more so than your first boss in your very first job. When said boss is tall, stunning, flame-haired and in a rock band, your teenage self quakes in their very presence. When I applied to be a Saturday girl in the Edinburgh branch of Miss Selfridge, I knew the staff would be cool. I just didn't think one of them would be Shirley Manson.
Before the alt-rock band Garbage penned a James Bond theme ('The World Is Not Enough', 1999) and sold-out stadiums, Manson, its lead singer, was my manager at Miss Selfridge. Of course she was: in the 80s it was the city's hottest store. Everyone shopped there, from the club kids to my history teacher. Sure, Topshop was great, but Miss Selfridge was its cooler little sister; the Miu Miu to its Prada. It had the best chainmail dresses, the best make-up and the best uniforms. My 20 per cent staff discount more than made up for the pong of the changing room at closing time.
Miss Selfridge is no more, like a slew of fashion meccas that live on only in the memory – Chelsea Girl, Clockhouse, Tammy Girl, Kookaï. Every woman has her favourite.
Remembering the shops from our youth evokes a particular wave of sentimentality. Like much of the UK, I felt an unexpected pang when Woolworths went into administration in 2008, an event that prompted an outpouring of Proustian memories among midlife British shoppers. When I was a little girl, as my mother browsed the aisles of household goods, I was given 10p to spend at the Pic'n'Mix counter. I remember stuffing a paper bag with chocolate tools, foam bananas, cola cubes, milk bottles and strawberry bonbons. Ten pence went a long way. All the way to the dentist.
Each vanishing shop closes another portal to a bygone time. As the planned closure of WH Smith proved, nostalgia can be sparked however prosaic and/or objectionable the retailer. Gen Z might struggle to romanticise the strip-lit, haphazardly laid out, shabby interiors of Britain's 233-year-old purveyor of stationery (they don't need it), greeting cards (they don't send them) and meal deals ('a rip-off compared to Tesco', according to my 14-year-old) but, for a certain generation, 'Smiths', as it was fondly known, was an electric blue-carpeted place of wonder.
'It had the best selection of scented rubbers,' remembers one friend, who still possesses the cake-scented Swiss-roll eraser she bought in the Reading branch circa 1986. 'We'd go to Smiths on the August bank holiday to stock up on stationery for the new school year. My dad would get his wallet out, huffing and puffing about the cost of a fluffy pencil case. The plastic bag always split, which would make him apoplectic. Smiths always had the weakest bags, with the flimsiest handles.' None of which prevented WH Smith from becoming one of the first chains to introduce a plastic bag fee. It was also an early adopter of the self-service checkout, and the dreaded TPC – till point conversation – which involved harried customers being asked whether they wanted a giant bar of Dairy Milk for £2.
I derive the same mawkish sentimentality from the retail landscape others might draw from the land. Just as my husband, a farmer's son, might lament the loss of a yew tree, I feel sad about the loss of Edinburgh retailers such as the second-hand store Flip or the cheap-as-chips womenswear retailer What Every Woman Wants. My mother, meanwhile, misses BHS. 'Feel the quality of that,' she'll say, proffering a beige BHS jumper bought some time in the early 90s. 'Better than M&S, I'll tell you.'
According to Professor Sophie Scott, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, it's not uncommon to attach huge emotional significance to shops. 'The connection they make to our past is heightened by the emotional context,' she explains. 'People feel nostalgia more intensely when they are with family and friends, or when eating, because these situations are rich in retrieval cues that trigger memories. Shops seem to fulfil a similar function.'
This might explain why so many midlife and millennial women still miss Topshop, despite its narrow range of sizes and associations with disgraced former owner Sir Philip Green. Were Topshop's jeans any better than H&M's? Were the heels in Freeman Hardy Willis or Ravel any different from those sold currently in Office or Kurt Geiger?
In an era when you can buy anything from anywhere (Trump's tariffs notwithstanding), what is it that we're nostalgic for – a frock or a feeling?
Maybe it's a connection to who we were. Online shopping may have sounded the death knell for any number of retailers, but it has also been deleterious in other ways. While a trip to the shops is clearly not as healthy as a bracing country walk, it's exponentially healthier than shopping online, an activity that requires precisely zero steps. Given some shopping malls have estimated that people walk up to seven miles on any given visit, the argument to frequent bricks and mortar stores is clear.
In-real-life shopping is also good for your mental health. For older customers, particularly those who live alone, a chat with a sales assistant can be the only social interaction of the day. It's why those who prioritise old-fashioned 'service with a smile' are so valued. 'Whether it's simply acting as a friendly face, our people make a real difference,' says James Breckenridge, John Lewis retail director. The store's 'school of service' initiative, which focuses on training employees, is said to have freed up over 500,000 hours for its sales assistants to spend helping customers.
Whatever our circumstances, however we like to spend Saturday afternoons, we all grieve the loss of our favourite shops. Accustomed to downloading any film on demand, our kids will never understand the white-knuckle ride of visiting the local Blockbuster Video with our parents, praying that Home Alone was in stock. Whether you miss Blockbuster or Biba, House of Fraser or Virgin Megastore, their closures likely marked the loss of something more nebulous and far more precious than the opportunity to rent the latest film or buy a new lipstick.
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