The news that the high street arm of the newsagent WH Smith is in ‘secret talks’ to be sold – talks so secretive that they have been splashed across every newspaper and broadcasting outlet in the country – should be greeted with a sigh accepting its all-but-inevitable fate. There can be little doubt that Smith’s, as it is colloquially known, has a remarkable history. Its first shop opened in London in 1792, and remained family-owned for over two centuries. It was a ubiquitous, hugely popular feature of public life.
At one point, you could buy your newspaper from a WH Smith stand at the railway and then borrow your books from a WH Smith library, which were often published by the company themselves. If you were so inclined, in the later 19th century you could even vote for the scion of the family, William Henry Smith, who successfully stood for parliament as the Conservative MP for Westminster, and later became the model for Gilbert and Sullivan’s pompous First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Joseph Porter from HMS Pinafore. It must have seemed that, much like the British Empire, the sun would never set on WH Smith.
Spending even a few moments at WH Smith is a regrettable experience
Unfortunately, changing tastes in retail (and empire) have meant that the group of over 500 high street stories so synonymous with the brand are now considered disposable. (The profitable, if utilitarian, railway and airport convenience stores are not thought to be included in the proposed sale.) It may be that a deep-pocketed buyer, influenced either by sentiment or the belief that they can turn around an ailing business, comes to Smith’s rescue and that it once again takes its rightful place on the high street as an iconic and much-loved shop. To which I can only say, looking at the similar fates that have befallen Debenham’s, the House of Fraser, Virgin Megastore and other former stalwarts of the Great British retail experience: don’t get your hopes up.
I occasionally have cause to visit my local WH Smith shop on Cornmarket Street in Oxford. It is a depressing, past-caring experience (on, admittedly, one of the city’s least seemly shopping streets) where several different but uniformly mediocre stores have been yoked into one, unlovely Frankenstein’s monster of a shop. On the ground floor, you can buy tasteless greeting cards and a haphazard, poorly presented selection of magazines, as well as overpriced stationery. Take the escalator up to the first floor, and you’ll find a defeated little bookshop, with a poorly presented selection of lowbrow bestsellers (take your pick from David Walliams or Jeffrey Archer, there’s little else there), and, bizarrely, a concession of the once-popular, now-damned children’s favourite Toys ‘R’ Us.
Spending even a few moments at WH Smith is a regrettable experience, even if it does occasionally seem like a good place to buy a bargain bar of chocolate while you purchase some piece of colourful plastic to keep your child happy. The group clearly has no future as it stands, and it has declined precipitously in quality since my youth. Once, it stocked the widest range of magazines imaginable, had an intelligently thought-through selection of books, and if you wished to buy videos or CDs, you could. Yet successive imagination-lacking takeovers and mergers and unsuccessful attempts at expansion have sucked the soul out of the business and left it enervated and in need of a metaphorical trip to Dignitas.
There is, inevitably, something sad about any business that has had such a storied and eventful history facing its end. Perhaps there could be grounds for optimism if some pioneering James Daunt-esque figure came up with a strategy to reignite public interest in the shops in a back-to-basics fashion, although heaven knows what form this would take. Otherwise, it looks likely that we are seeing the inevitable conclusion of a long, once-grand saga. Like too many other things in public life today, there seems to be no reasonable hope for its revival.
