As a young man, magazines were my window to the world. That wonder will be lost when all the shops have gone | John Harris
Towards the end of the 1970s, the brief but spectacular career of those punk rockers and folk devils the Sex Pistols was followed by The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, a rather tawdry drama-documentary. It recast their rise and fall as a huge scam, summed up by a slogan on a T-shirt worn by their former manager Malcolm McLaren: “Cash from Chaos”.
Back then, that motto was a neat representation of his personal brand of cultural mischief. But the culture always takes unexpected twists and turns – and 50 years on, an almost-identical maxim seems to be defining the fate of an increasing chunk of the British retail economy. While Andy Burnham pledges to restore life to town centres, a private equity outfit is busy buying up national retail chains and then shutting down scores of their outlets, while seemingly operating in line with its boss’s most celebrated quotation: “Where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.”
Those words came from Jamie Constable, the owner of a set of businesses that includes Modella Capital, which specialises in “distressed investing” and “aggressive restructuring”. In 2024, Modella bought the craft supplies chain Hobbycraft – insisting on its “real commitment to bricks-and-mortar retail”, but then shutting 18 shops and triggering 600 job losses, while leaving redundancy costs to the taxpayer. Months later, it acquired the discount outlets branded as The Original Factory Shop, only for the entire chain to collapse. But its most ambitious move was its recent purchase of the 480 high-street shops that previously traded as WH Smith, rebranded by Modella as TG Jones (a completely made-up name, which it said would “keep that sense of a family business”), and the rapidly announced closure of up to 150 of them.
In September, 19 branches breathed their last, in such varied locations as Bath, Southend, Cardigan, Redhill and the Essex new town of Basildon. This month, the shutters are permanently falling in – among 23 places – Pinner, Truro, Inverness and Leek in Staffordshire. Thanks to their shortsighted folding into previous WH Smith premises, the closure plan will inevitably mean the loss of many local post offices: by early 2027, 70 will have gone. It will inevitably accelerate the decline of printed newspapers. But for me and many others, the key tragedy in this story is all about magazines, those gloriously tactile creations that played a crucial role in making many of us who we are.
I say that as someone who fell in love with this form of publishing as a child, via a weekly educational magazine called Look and Learn – stuffed, as I recall, with comic-strip versions of Dickens stories, and stuff about space exploration. By my early teens, I was an avid reader of Sounds, the Melody Maker and NME, the so-called weekly music papers that were really magazines whose ink came off on your fingers. Much to my amazement, between my 19th and 26th birthdays, I ended up successively working for all three – until, in 1995, I joined the now defunct company Emap Metro, which set enormous store by its mastery of glossy fortnightlies and monthlies.
Some of these names may mean precious little to younger readers, but spark a Proustian rush among older ones: Q, Smash Hits, Select (which I edited for three years), Sky, the metal and hard rock title Kerrang!, Big, Neon, FHM. Most have now closed, but three of the old stable are still standing, under different ownership: Kerrang!, which mostly lives online; the film bible Empire; and Mojo, the lovingly produced music magazine that I am thrilled to still write for.
Thirty years ago, we all knew that there was no better medium for in-depth interviews, or high-end photography. The management constantly asked us who our intended reader was, and what the future was likely to entail. Even the smallest cover-lines were pored over, as if the mere mention of Placebo or DJ Shadow might attract scores of newbies. And though a lot of us didn’t listen, we were told to never, ever put our magazines in sealed plastic bags (which, in line with a longstanding convention, would contain “free gifts”), for fear of losing the kind of punter who liked to browse before they bought.
And therein lies the TG Jones tragedy. The business has rightly acquired an utterly grim reputation, but is – or was – one reliable place to still find shelves full of printed content worthy of endless curiosity. And now? The culturally omnivorous twentysomething in Rickmansworth will no longer chance upon the latest edition of the cutting-edge music monthly the Wire, and thereby be inducted into a world of esoteric electronica and contemporary avant-garde jazz. The student-age customer in Ormskirk tiring of production-line pop may know nothing of the more substantial music covered by Mojo’s excellent competitor Uncut.
Would-be radicals will be unable to browse the printed iteration of Tribune; film freaks may be completely unaware of the in-depth, art-house wonders of Sight and Sound. Publishers will fall over themselves to alert us to subscription offers, but for a lot of people, they will be prohibitively expensive.
As George Orwell once put it, the UK is “a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Products that reflect that enduring aspect of our national character are still at the core of magazine publishing, and why some titles still sell enviably: at the last count, for example, BBC Gardeners’ World sold a monthly average of 164,807 copies, while Country Living shifted 107,596. The broad women’s and fashion sector is also still here. It isn’t all over, by any means.
after newsletter promotion
Still, one can easily imagine a Mark Zuckerberg-esque voice scoffing at all this as so much stone-age nonsense, and claiming that what printed magazines deliver can easily be either replicated or superseded on the internet. Experience often suggests otherwise: witness the fate of the once-independent online music magazine Pitchfork, bought out by the corporate publisher Condé Nast in 2015 and bizarrely folded into the workings of the men’s title GQ nine years later: a classic case of what we now know as enshittification. But there is an even bigger point here about how we now engage with the things we like and love, summarised in a forthcoming book titled Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm by the Nashville-based US music insider David Macias, with a foreword written by Dan Clancy, the CEO of the livestreaming platform Twitch.
His argument is about music, but its logic applies across the cultural, recreational and sporting board. “The algorithm is great at finding me new music in the limited style I listen to,” he writes. “But it is really bad at showing me something new and different. My listening has become homogeneous, even though I can pick any album ever created.” This is the tedious prospect that the demise of the magazine will only accelerate – so after the high-street chaos has died down, we could be faced with an awful silence, broken only by the leakage from headphones playing the same things over and over again. And to speak the language of the insatiable capitalist, where will anyone find money in that?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
The closure of former WH Smith stores around the UK is sobering on many levels. The publications they sold were there to be perused, to broaden horizons. Towards the end of the…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Towards the end of the 1970s, the brief but spectacular career of those punk rockers and folk devils the Sex Pistols was followed by The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, a rather tawdry drama-documentary. It recast their rise and fall as a huge scam, summed up by a slogan on a T-shirt worn by their former manager Malcolm McLaren: “Cash from Chaos”.
Back then, that motto was a neat representation of his personal brand of cultural mischief. But the culture always takes unexpected twists and turns – and 50 years on, an almost-identical maxim seems to be defining the fate of an increasing chunk of the British retail economy. While Andy Burnham pledges to restore life to town centres, a private equity outfit is busy buying up national retail chains and then shutting down scores of their outlets, while seemingly operating in line with its boss’s most celebrated quotation: “Where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.”
Those words came from Jamie Constable, the owner of a set of businesses that includes Modella Capital, which specialises in “distressed investing” and “aggressive restructuring”. In 2024, Modella bought the craft supplies chain Hobbycraft – insisting on its “real commitment to bricks-and-mortar retail”, but then shutting 18 shops and triggering 600 job losses, while leaving redundancy costs to the taxpayer. Months later, it acquired the discount outlets branded as The Original Factory Shop, only for the entire chain to collapse. But its most ambitious move was its recent purchase of the 480 high-street shops that previously traded as WH Smith, rebranded by Modella as TG Jones (a completely made-up name, which it said would “keep that sense of a family business”), and the rapidly announced closure of up to 150 of them.
In September, 19 branches breathed their last, in such varied locations as Bath, Southend, Cardigan, Redhill and the Essex new town of Basildon. This month, the shutters are permanently falling in – among 23 places – Pinner, Truro, Inverness and Leek in Staffordshire. Thanks to their shortsighted folding into previous WH Smith premises, the closure plan will inevitably mean the loss of many local post offices: by early 2027, 70 will have gone. It will inevitably accelerate the decline of printed newspapers. But for me and many others, the key tragedy in this story is all about magazines, those gloriously tactile creations that played a crucial role in making many of us who we are.
I say that as someone who fell in love with this form of publishing as a child, via a weekly educational magazine called Look and Learn – stuffed, as I recall, with comic-strip versions of Dickens stories, and stuff about space exploration. By my early teens, I was an avid reader of Sounds, the Melody Maker and NME, the so-called weekly music papers that were really magazines whose ink came off on your fingers. Much to my amazement, between my 19th and 26th birthdays, I ended up successively working for all three – until, in 1995, I joined the now defunct company Emap Metro, which set enormous store by its mastery of glossy fortnightlies and monthlies.
Some of these names may mean precious little to younger readers, but spark a Proustian rush among older ones: Q, Smash Hits, Select (which I edited for three years), Sky, the metal and hard rock title Kerrang!, Big, Neon, FHM. Most have now closed, but three of the old stable are still standing, under different ownership: Kerrang!, which mostly lives online; the film bible Empire; and Mojo, the lovingly produced music magazine that I am thrilled to still write for.
Thirty years ago, we all knew that there was no better medium for in-depth interviews, or high-end photography. The management constantly asked us who our intended reader was, and what the future was likely to entail. Even the smallest cover-lines were pored over, as if the mere mention of Placebo or DJ Shadow might attract scores of newbies. And though a lot of us didn’t listen, we were told to never, ever put our magazines in sealed plastic bags (which, in line with a longstanding convention, would contain “free gifts”), for fear of losing the kind of punter who liked to browse before they bought.
And therein lies the TG Jones tragedy. The business has rightly acquired an utterly grim reputation, but is – or was – one reliable place to still find shelves full of printed content worthy of endless curiosity. And now? The culturally omnivorous twentysomething in Rickmansworth will no longer chance upon the latest edition of the cutting-edge music monthly the Wire, and thereby be inducted into a world of esoteric electronica and contemporary avant-garde jazz. The student-age customer in Ormskirk tiring of production-line pop may know nothing of the more substantial music covered by Mojo’s excellent competitor Uncut.
Would-be radicals will be unable to browse the printed iteration of Tribune; film freaks may be completely unaware of the in-depth, art-house wonders of Sight and Sound. Publishers will fall over themselves to alert us to subscription offers, but for a lot of people, they will be prohibitively expensive.
As George Orwell once put it, the UK is “a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Products that reflect that enduring aspect of our national character are still at the core of magazine publishing, and why some titles still sell enviably: at the last count, for example, BBC Gardeners’ World sold a monthly average of 164,807 copies, while Country Living shifted 107,596. The broad women’s and fashion sector is also still here. It isn’t all over, by any means.
after newsletter promotion
Still, one can easily imagine a Mark Zuckerberg-esque voice scoffing at all this as so much stone-age nonsense, and claiming that what printed magazines deliver can easily be either replicated or superseded on the internet. Experience often suggests otherwise: witness the fate of the once-independent online music magazine Pitchfork, bought out by the corporate publisher Condé Nast in 2015 and bizarrely folded into the workings of the men’s title GQ nine years later: a classic case of what we now know as enshittification. But there is an even bigger point here about how we now engage with the things we like and love, summarised in a forthcoming book titled Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm by the Nashville-based US music insider David Macias, with a foreword written by Dan Clancy, the CEO of the livestreaming platform Twitch.
His argument is about music, but its logic applies across the cultural, recreational and sporting board. “The algorithm is great at finding me new music in the limited style I listen to,” he writes. “But it is really bad at showing me something new and different. My listening has become homogeneous, even though I can pick any album ever created.” This is the tedious prospect that the demise of the magazine will only accelerate – so after the high-street chaos has died down, we could be faced with an awful silence, broken only by the leakage from headphones playing the same things over and over again. And to speak the language of the insatiable capitalist, where will anyone find money in that?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
Towards the end of the 1970s, the brief but spectacular career of those punk rockers and folk devils the Sex Pistols was followed by The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, a rather tawdry drama-documentary. It recast their rise and fall as a huge scam, summed up by a slogan on a T-shirt worn by their former manager Malcolm McLaren: “Cash from Chaos”.
Back then, that motto was a neat representation of his personal brand of cultural mischief. But the culture always takes unexpected twists and turns – and 50 years on, an almost-identical maxim seems to be defining the fate of an increasing chunk of the British retail economy. While Andy Burnham pledges to restore life to town centres, a private equity outfit is busy buying up national retail chains and then shutting down scores of their outlets, while seemingly operating in line with its boss’s most celebrated quotation: “Where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.”
Those words came from Jamie Constable, the owner of a set of businesses that includes Modella Capital, which specialises in “distressed investing” and “aggressive restructuring”. In 2024, Modella bought the craft supplies chain Hobbycraft – insisting on its “real commitment to bricks-and-mortar retail”, but then shutting 18 shops and triggering 600 job losses, while leaving redundancy costs to the taxpayer. Months later, it acquired the discount outlets branded as The Original Factory Shop, only for the entire chain to collapse. But its most ambitious move was its recent purchase of the 480 high-street shops that previously traded as WH Smith, rebranded by Modella as TG Jones (a completely made-up name, which it said would “keep that sense of a family business”), and the rapidly announced closure of up to 150 of them.
In September, 19 branches breathed their last, in such varied locations as Bath, Southend, Cardigan, Redhill and the Essex new town of Basildon. This month, the shutters are permanently falling in – among 23 places – Pinner, Truro, Inverness and Leek in Staffordshire. Thanks to their shortsighted folding into previous WH Smith premises, the closure plan will inevitably mean the loss of many local post offices: by early 2027, 70 will have gone. It will inevitably accelerate the decline of printed newspapers. But for me and many others, the key tragedy in this story is all about magazines, those gloriously tactile creations that played a crucial role in making many of us who we are.
I say that as someone who fell in love with this form of publishing as a child, via a weekly educational magazine called Look and Learn – stuffed, as I recall, with comic-strip versions of Dickens stories, and stuff about space exploration. By my early teens, I was an avid reader of Sounds, the Melody Maker and NME, the so-called weekly music papers that were really magazines whose ink came off on your fingers. Much to my amazement, between my 19th and 26th birthdays, I ended up successively working for all three – until, in 1995, I joined the now defunct company Emap Metro, which set enormous store by its mastery of glossy fortnightlies and monthlies.
Some of these names may mean precious little to younger readers, but spark a Proustian rush among older ones: Q, Smash Hits, Select (which I edited for three years), Sky, the metal and hard rock title Kerrang!, Big, Neon, FHM. Most have now closed, but three of the old stable are still standing, under different ownership: Kerrang!, which mostly lives online; the film bible Empire; and Mojo, the lovingly produced music magazine that I am thrilled to still write for.
Thirty years ago, we all knew that there was no better medium for in-depth interviews, or high-end photography. The management constantly asked us who our intended reader was, and what the future was likely to entail. Even the smallest cover-lines were pored over, as if the mere mention of Placebo or DJ Shadow might attract scores of newbies. And though a lot of us didn’t listen, we were told to never, ever put our magazines in sealed plastic bags (which, in line with a longstanding convention, would contain “free gifts”), for fear of losing the kind of punter who liked to browse before they bought.
And therein lies the TG Jones tragedy. The business has rightly acquired an utterly grim reputation, but is – or was – one reliable place to still find shelves full of printed content worthy of endless curiosity. And now? The culturally omnivorous twentysomething in Rickmansworth will no longer chance upon the latest edition of the cutting-edge music monthly the Wire, and thereby be inducted into a world of esoteric electronica and contemporary avant-garde jazz. The student-age customer in Ormskirk tiring of production-line pop may know nothing of the more substantial music covered by Mojo’s excellent competitor Uncut.
Would-be radicals will be unable to browse the printed iteration of Tribune; film freaks may be completely unaware of the in-depth, art-house wonders of Sight and Sound. Publishers will fall over themselves to alert us to subscription offers, but for a lot of people, they will be prohibitively expensive.
As George Orwell once put it, the UK is “a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”. Products that reflect that enduring aspect of our national character are still at the core of magazine publishing, and why some titles still sell enviably: at the last count, for example, BBC Gardeners’ World sold a monthly average of 164,807 copies, while Country Living shifted 107,596. The broad women’s and fashion sector is also still here. It isn’t all over, by any means.
after newsletter promotion
Still, one can easily imagine a Mark Zuckerberg-esque voice scoffing at all this as so much stone-age nonsense, and claiming that what printed magazines deliver can easily be either replicated or superseded on the internet. Experience often suggests otherwise: witness the fate of the once-independent online music magazine Pitchfork, bought out by the corporate publisher Condé Nast in 2015 and bizarrely folded into the workings of the men’s title GQ nine years later: a classic case of what we now know as enshittification. But there is an even bigger point here about how we now engage with the things we like and love, summarised in a forthcoming book titled Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm by the Nashville-based US music insider David Macias, with a foreword written by Dan Clancy, the CEO of the livestreaming platform Twitch.
His argument is about music, but its logic applies across the cultural, recreational and sporting board. “The algorithm is great at finding me new music in the limited style I listen to,” he writes. “But it is really bad at showing me something new and different. My listening has become homogeneous, even though I can pick any album ever created.” This is the tedious prospect that the demise of the magazine will only accelerate – so after the high-street chaos has died down, we could be faced with an awful silence, broken only by the leakage from headphones playing the same things over and over again. And to speak the language of the insatiable capitalist, where will anyone find money in that?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- The closure of former WH Smith stores around the UK is sobering on many levels.
- The publications they sold were there to be perused, to broaden horizons.
- Towards the end of the…