Read all about it... how the traditional British newsagent began

It was George Orwell who best summed up the image and appearance of the traditional British newsagent’s shop.
circa 1937:  Newsagent's shop with latest news placards outside.  (Photo by London Express/Getty Images)circa 1937:  Newsagent's shop with latest news placards outside.  (Photo by London Express/Getty Images)
circa 1937: Newsagent's shop with latest news placards outside. (Photo by London Express/Getty Images)

“You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent,” he wrote shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War.

“The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same,” he went on. “A poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.”

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These seldom seen pictures from the archive demonstrate the accuracy of his description. They also bear witness to the declining fortunes of the shop on the corner, where once men queued outside to get their hands on the pink football editions on Saturday evenings, and children handed over their pocket money for two penn’orth of sweets and a copy of Boys’ Own Paper or the Schoolgirls’ Own Library.

Shopkeeper Mrs Doris Shepherd at work behind the counter of her London shop.    (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)Shopkeeper Mrs Doris Shepherd at work behind the counter of her London shop.    (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)
Shopkeeper Mrs Doris Shepherd at work behind the counter of her London shop. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

“Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks,” Orwell wrote.

It was at the end of the Victorian era that newsagents’ shops evolved from general purpose stationers. It was a time when news was still a novelty, and the first picture papers found new ways of delivering it. It was to service this newly enfranchised working-class readership that the first newsagents set out their stall. Alongside the morning and evening titles and the periodicals were cigarettes, confectionary and in time, the first Penguin paperbacks – which were designed to be sold away from the more upmarket bookshops. It was a marketing move that ignited a range war between paper shops and other retailers who resented such a wide array of goods being sold under the same roof.

Today, it is that very range that underpins the survival of the shops that remain.

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