In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things in and trying not to focus too much on the obvious. This involves looking up, as we’re always told to do (by people like me, for example) above shop fronts, but also looking down towards semi-basements and cellars, and looking horizontally, down alleys and along back streets. Drifting is not easy in a busy city centre in the middle of summer, but when looking up I did manage to catch sight of some interesting details without bumping into too many people. One such was this old sign for W. H. Smith, newsagents and booksellers, a name about to disappear from Britain’s high streets after more than 200 years.
Smith’s was founded by Henry Walton Smith in 1792, but its great expansion occurred under his grandson, William Henry Smith, who had the idea of station bookstalls during the railway boom of the 1840s and turned the business into a nationwide multiple retailer. By 1905, when this hanging sign was designed by artist Septimus E. Scott, there were branches of Smith’s in hundreds of locations, both high streets and stations. The sign shows a Smith’s newsboy, who sold newspapers, magazines and the occasionally book from a large basket, crying his wares as he went along, as did many other on-street newspaper sellers in days gone by.*
There are still a few newsboy signs hanging above what are still, at the time of writing, branches of Smith’s. They’re not all exactly the same – many were standard enamel signs but others seem to have been hand-painted – so it’s worth giving each one a good look. The brackets vary too, with different combinations of wrought-iron curlicues, some also featuring the name of the business, others incorporating the company’s oval-shaped ‘WHS’ device. Now the shops they adorn and advertise are being sold, as W. H. Smith undertakes the most drastic of the various restructures that have marked its recent decades. Because selling books, newspapers and magazines from high-street locations have all been hit by online sales, the role of a bricks and mortar newsagent is a tough one to play. Smith’s say they make most of their money from their travel agency business (mostly in separate shops). So another owner is buying the traditional Smith’s stores and they’ll be rebranded as ’T G Jones’.†
It’s a sad end to a long history and one hopes that the new owners are able to run the stores profitably. In spite of the effects of rival online trading, there seem to be plenty of customers in my local branch, some buying newspapers, books, or stationery, some using the Post Office counter the store contains. I also hope that the signs that still hang above such shops as those in Cirencester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Worcester, Chester and elsewhere, are retained and looked after, to remind us of the long history of retailing by this once-pioneering business,.
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* I remember as a boy listening to a street newspaper seller in Lincoln repeatedly chanting a mantra that sounded to me like ‘Hurry up, folks’. When I got nearer, I saw the name of the newspaper he was selling: the Nottingham Post.
† T G Jones (which will probably be written ‘TG Jones’), is not named after a real person. It’s a name chosen, according to a piece in the Financial Times, to reflect ‘these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street’. Hm.
