Occasionally, I come across a story that may have limited reach but strikes a very personal chord. I hope that, like the best chefs, if I season my reporting sparingly enough with them, I get to indulge without too much offense. This is one of those stories. One of the UK’s most famous and longstanding retailers, W H Smith, has been sold. The simple blue-and-white signs bearing its name will no longer frequent the high street.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
W H Smith is, like the late lamented Woolworth, one of those stores that people my age remember fondly from childhood. As I am now fifty-three, that, I would argue, is precisely its problem. Preteen me’s favorite Christmas gift was W H Smith tokens, which I would then descend upon the store to spend as soon as it opened after the break. What’s still great about Smith’s is that it has everything a young nerd in the making could want: stationery, music, games, and, yes, books.
Champion of the Airport Novel
In slightly more recent years, it is as a book retailer that W H Smith has really made waves. It attracted some howls of derision when it was named Book Retailer of the Year at the 2016 British Book Industry Awards. But what W H Smith did so well was get people reading who otherwise wouldn’t. Most notably, it became synonymous with the term airport novel (because many of its outlets are in airports). And it brought hundreds of thousands of new readers not just to books but to book culture through its partnership with the wildly popular Richard and Judy Book Club.
A New Chapter—or the Last?
The sale of W H Smith includes 480 high street stores but not the name. The new name will, it seems, be T G Jones. This appears to be a somewhat strange play on words (Smith and Jones are surnames forever associated with each other, and T G are simply the next consonants back from W H). Whether this is a new start or the beginning of a downward spiral, it is a sign that high street book retailing is not immune to change.
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