Someone was so upset in Bristol that they left a floral tribute at Nipper’s foot. In London, the film crews arrived as the vultures descended on the last sale. HMV – His Master’s Voice – the British high street chain that had survived for nearly a hundred years had gone into liquidation. I went to the flagship on Oxford Street to feel what the final days were like – it’s the largest record store in the world – and paradoxically it was packed to the rafters. I’ve never seen the place busier, and I’d been going there forever.
I still preferred it to Amazon for the simple reason that you could browse when you had a spare few minutes, and find something you hadn’t expected. This remains the problem with Amazon – no matter how sophisticated the listing process becomes, you will never be looking in one section and have your eye caught by something on the other side of the room. But I have to say it was badly run, with stock fragmented away from its core business of music and film to include games, software and other bits and pieces. Whenever a chain does this it feels doomed.
The owners say it will survive in one form or another, and I hope it does. In the same week, Jessops photography folded and Blockbuster finally vanished for good. Now Tesco and other chains have been accused of selling burgers tainted with other meat products, and it feels as if the traditional high street is really starting to change.
I hope so. Over Christmas I set off with the intention of shopping in the West End several times and got derailed by the wares in a new wave of cool indie local shops in King’s Cross. I have never used a car to go food shopping because there are plenty of small shops and markets in Central London. I buy French bread and cheeses in St Pancras Station, fresh fish and vegetables in Islington, but good meat remains a problem because there are so few butchers left now.
However, it’s difficult for families to do this. It takes time and costs more, but the alternative is to end up back at a supermarket. Online orderers Hubbub round up the best from small shops in your area and deliver when you get home, allowing local producers to stay busy on weekdays as well as the weekends. Supermarkets are at the bottom of the quality chain. Produce is graded, top quality for hotels and restaurants, then local suppliers and finally the big chains. Surely it’s better to consume less and make it high quality, rather than eating high volumes of third-rate food?
For years now, satellite chainstore malls have been destroying inner city high streets, but small shops can fight back if their rents stay controlled. Pop-up shops have gone from being a novelty to being ubiquitous, and many stay the course to become permanent. Perhaps Nipper will live on in some way, but it’s looking like the high street may really be changing for good.
The trademark of HMV little dog Nipper was a real animal he died in 1895 and was buried beneath the Lloyds Bank in I think its CLarence street Kingston Surrey where NIPPER ALLEY commemorates the little dog which became the HMV logo. The signs been nicked a couple of times by souvenir hunters but if HMV does pass away will just become another bit of forgotten signage i suppose ……….
Well it is no surprize to me that HMV have blown up… To be brutal they lost the plot a long time ago. While I used to find rare and obscure music on its shelves this all but disapeard some time ago and I found myself looking more to Amazon to find my oddities, eventually I didn’t even bother to go in the shop as close as it was to me at work. I would find myself drawn away to other smaller shops and even market stalls to find the less mass market music and DVD I love. As for the online HMV shop it was a mine field and very hard to find anything of interest and the prices were all over what you would have to pay on Amazon…. Enough said I think.
I have a number of HMV red label 78s that I treasure stored in plastic and stiff-paper albums. These are great sounding and handsome disks. Nipper in full colour in the center above the hole! Sorry the company went under.
And – hold on -yet another story which I’ll make brief: For years on my drive to work in Washington, I went down a narrow road with a number of ups and downs. Topping one such off to the right beyond some trees, near a gas/petrol station would, appear a four-story Nipper. As real, except for size, as could be and always amazing to suddenly see.
Eventually I pulled over and went across to find out what the story was. A man and his wife had bought the promotional statue from a world fair and freighted it home. It and the gramaphone stood there for many years, sometimes wearing a cap of snow, sometimes with the sunrise behind its ears and always a welcoming sight above the trees. Then it disappeared.
The Washington Post eventually had the story: The couple had sold it and it had been trucked away to the Midwest, somewhere, to be used in a shopping center – I think.
My cynical self says “high volumes of third-rate” is what’s on offer these days, from food to the internet to clothing to music to movies to……too much. She said, grumpily.
The second picture hints at the wider tale. HMV was in it’s time, the equal of a well known store named after a fruit [the one linked with sin, that sells the shiny white things].
It started selling gramophones, and only dabbled in the tawdy business of music as a necessary evil, if you want to sell ‘hardware’ somebody has to sell ‘software’. And it was also is a handy supply of income, though not as profitable.
Just as the market for ‘grams’ was getting saturated, a stoke of good luck happened, and domestic ‘Wireless’ was born, along with other home electrical wares. They made and sold a lot of their own brands, so making a very tidy sum.
They struck lucky again, with the arrival of Television. The last big thing was the invention of the ‘teenager’. By now they are very big, very comfortable, and frankly complacent.
This had taken about 50 years, and other companies have been watching and slowly catching up, and they now make better and cheaper ‘hardware’. But HMV can lumber on, records are booming, they own a few record labels, all is fine.
But a shop isn’t just a shop, it’s a delivery system, and if somebody invents a better or cheaper delivery system, it might get ‘sticky’. Oh! some one has, “f-f-f-fiddlesticks!”.
That and the fact that old customers were ‘falling off the twig’ and not being replaced, new potential customers were not remotely interested. “What’s an album, Grandad?”
Add in the inexorable rise in the cost of trading in high profile locations and a series of increasingly desperate moves into other areas, that were each ‘circling the drain’ already. The lid was on and muffled sound of hammering, was ringing out like the final knell.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls” etc.
In the end they didn’t just not ask, they were too busy ramming bits of the torn up sleeves of Skeletal Spice’s latest attempt to diminish the world’s supply of usable plastic* into their ears, to drown out the sound.
[*Apart from that stuffed up her jumper obviously].
Is it the end of record shops, probably not. In the same way Blockbuster will not be the end of video sales, the casual rental of physical discs perhaps.
They have monopolised the space for so long, unless somebody fills the vacuum quickly, people will get out of the habit and move to some other method, legal or otherwise.
Where there is demand some one will rise to fill it, will there be a return to local niche shops?
I’ll not miss HMV as much as Tower Records, it was great for foreign imports & magazines, magazines at least I could still get at Borders . . . until they went under too
Ebay it is now . . .
An interesting piece of trivia. In the picture of nipper looking into the horn of the gramophone by artist Frances Barraud, he is sitting on the lid of his master’s coffin. A lovely piece of maudlin sentimentality that adds a little to the story I think.
I attended a boarding school in California that had the remains of Nipper buried on the grounds. No one knew quite where.he was, just that he was somewhere on the grounds of Menlo School for Boys which had inherited the old Victor Mansion in Atherton, south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley. I will be happy to have this tidbit of obscure information rattling around Mr. Bryant’s brain as well as my own. This one takes some pride in recognizing a sympathetic character, though the world has careened into oblivion. I look forward to visiting the list of pubs attached to Victoria Vanishes and am sure that the images of my visits will pop up out of time but in some magical and curious context that will have my wife rolling her lovely eyes in the most bizarre manner, Thank you! Charlie
So Nipper is buried in London and in Atherton, CA. Any other bids? We have some of those 78′s, too, mostly from the 40′s when my parents were buying them. I really like Snowy’s analysis of the history of marketing. Substitute any one of a dozen different items for HMV and his outline will fit. It makes me feel a little better about the inevitable change of everything. Re Bryant and May: I bought a bag of Sherbet Lemons and one of Pear Drops while in Victoria and my husband is now partial to the lemons because you can taste them for hours afterward and therefore don’t feel the need to eat any more. Interesting logic.