In my childhood, in the 1950s and 1960s, WH Smith was an essential presence on every high street. It supplied some of my favourite items: books, comics, stationery. And in Chester the shop itself had a romantic allure. Housed in a black and white, half timbered, mock Tudor building, it advertised its presence only with a swinging sign suspended from ornate iron brackets and discreet lettering above the entrance.
The lettering, designed by Eric Gill in 1903, was common to all branches of WH Smith at the time, and the hanging sign featured at many branches. Designed by Septimus E Scott in 1905 these signs were usually made of enamelled steel and featured a newsboy brandishing a newspaper with a tray of books and papers in a basket. Some branches had “boy lanterns” where the image was on glass illuminated from within.
In Chester newspapers, magazines and comics occupied the front of the shop, an enticing display spread across a huge counter, the smell of warm printers’ ink hanging in the air above, competing with a chilly blast coming in from the street, for during working hours the shop front stood completely open, and it is winter in my memory.
Deeper inside the shop behind swing doors was the cosy stationery department: a wellspring of fountain pens, Quink ink, pencils graded from 9B through HB to 9H, crayons, pencil sharpeners and rubbers, rulers and protractors, pencil cases, and notebooks. Basildon Bond writing paper and envelopes jostled for space with the more exotic airmail stationery, tissue thin with blue and red borders, and the severe brown envelopes favoured by businesses.
But the greatest delight lay at the top of the broad, creaking L-shaped stair whose dark timbers clung to the panelled walls and whose banister gleamed with polish. For this led to a room where leaded lights in mullioned frames punctuated the panelling, and shelves and tables overflowed with books. Here hardcovers held sway, and it required several months pocket money or a birthday windfall to effect a purchase from the generously stocked children’s section. But I could browse for hours undisturbed, benefitting from the dappled light which discouraged older eyes.
The truth is that though nicely bound and with attractive dust jackets the quality of the literature was not always high; librarians and teachers would have disapproved of the complete set of Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers stories which I coveted. But from its beginnings WHSmith had catered without pretension for popular taste alongside respectable literature.
Henry Walden Smith and his wife Anna had established a newsvendors shop in London just before their son was born in 1792. Anna’s husband died when their son was only a few weeks old, but she continued the business and the son, William Henry (1792-1865) duly took over, renaming the shop WH Smith.
William Henry expanded the business and began sending London newspapers to rural towns by mail coach. He invented Smith’s Peculiar Slipknot which enabled packers to draw the string around the newspaper parcels as tightly as if it had been done by machinery. Every morning at 5am he would be outside his shop in the Strand, in his shirt sleeves, sorting and tying, priding himself on being the quickest packer.
Sometimes there was a delay in the publication of newspapers, and the mail coach would leave without them. William Henry built a light cart with fast horses and employed drivers to pursue the Mail when this happened. When news broke after publication, he sent messengers on horseback carrying printed slips with updates for customers in provincial towns.
Newspapers carried a stamp duty and were expensive. In 1821 William Henry opened a Reading Room at his premises in the Strand where for a daily fee “gentlemen” were invited to read the news more cheaply.
The second William Henry (1825-1891) joined his father in the business just as the railways began to supplant the mail coaches. Unregulated stalls had mushroomed at railway stations selling buns, books, and beverages, often of dubious quality. To raise the standard, and their own income, railway directors invited tenders for holding official stalls. William Henry’s bid was successful; he obtained the exclusive right to sell books and newspapers on the London and Northwestern Company’s stations and established his first stall at Euston in 1848. In 1850 he opened stalls on platforms in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. As the railways expanded so did his business. By 1862 he had a monopoly with stalls on the stations of every railway company in England.
He moved into publishing, producing the “railway novels,” also known as “yellow backs,” * or “mustard plaster novels.” These cheap books bound in yellow board covers, with adverts at the back helping to cut production costs, were the precursors of paperbacks. They covered popular genres of crime, suspense, and romance, undemanding literature suitable for wiling away a train journey, although there were also cheap reprints of Dickens and Shakespeare.
William Henry began lending books from his railway stalls; for a small fee books could be borrowed at one station and returned at another. A circulating library in the Strand followed.
Meanwhile he had benefitted from the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers and from his position as the sole distributor of the Times as circulation increased during the Crimean war.
William Henry had never employed workers on Sundays or distributed Sunday newspapers, but he made an exception when the list of killed and wounded at the Battle of Alma came through late on a Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, he opened his railway bookstalls to allow soldiers’ relatives to check the lists.
His son, William Frederick Danvers Smith (1868-1928), inherited the business and was responsible for the proliferation of high street stores in the early twentieth century. From 1905 the railway companies had demanded higher rents for the station stalls. So, William Frederick moved the focus of the business to shops, often located on approaches to the station to capture the passenger trade. Circulating libraries operated within the shops.
These were the shops that were still flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s although by then most of the circulating libraries had gone, rendered obsolete by the growth of public libraries. It was during this time that the statistician Gordon Foster, hired by the firm, originated the nine-digit code for referencing books which became accepted as the International Standard Book Numbering, ISBN, in 1970.
But in the 1970s, though still successful businesses, the shops began to lose their unique character as they were modernised. In many towns this meant plate glass, crude signage, and cheap fittings. As a listed building the exterior of the Chester branch was protected, but inside the beautiful staircase was ripped out to make more floor space, the panelling disappeared, the newspapers were removed from their glorious display area and shunted into a corner of the airless new shop floor, and the book room was lost to storage.
Yet in one branch, at Newtown in Powys, something special happened. For here instead of being updated the shop was restored to its appearance when it had first opened in 1927, with a small museum upstairs where the former circulating library had been. Tiles, light fittings, and oak shelving emerged from storage, and although not housed in such an attractive building, the shop in Newtown had the same old-world charm that I remembered in the Chester store.
But from the late twentieth century onwards WHSmith, faced with competition from budget shops, supermarkets and online traders, became run down and shabby. The quality of merchandise declined. In February 2025, all the high street stores were sold to the private equity firm Modella capital. Some remain open, fictitiously renamed TG Jones, to give the false impression that it is still a family business. Other branches have been closed, including, in an act of supreme vandalism, the Newtown shop, where the delightful old fixtures and fittings have been removed and the building is on the market as a “development opportunity.”
RIP WHSmith
*Not to be confused with the French yellow novels of the 1890s. WH Smith had a puritanical streak, and nothing salacious reached his bookstalls.
To appreciate what has been lost with the closure of the Newtown shop see, The WH Smith Museum: Hidden Gem in Newtown, Powys. H18-PDW
