That's it for WH Smith

 ...on the high street anyway. In the mid- to late-1960s WH Smith on Coney St in York was our go-to record store. On the ground floor was the newsagent/bookshop and in the basement was the music (all on vinyl obviously). You could go to the counter and ask to hear a record and they would send you to one of the listening booths where you could sit and hear the latest Beatles, Who, or Stones records. 

This was the only way to hear most music before you bought it, as most radio stations only played the singles and anyway who had time (or access for that matter) to listen to much radio apart from the BBC's top twenty show on a Sunday afternoon?

My first LPs were almost certainly bought there: A Hard Day's Night, Help, Rubber Soul, Sgt Peppers, A Quick One, Waiting for the Sun. 

The problem was... your new purchase could have been played umpteen times to punters in those booths! And possibly by the WH Smith staff at weekends! So when Virgin Records came along with a mail order option, that quickly became the retailer of choice because you could be fairly certain that your records were unplayed (virgin). 

(Then Virgin opened a store in Leeds where you could sit on bean bags and listen to your requests through headphones. We actually made a pilgrimage there from Sheffield as students just to take a look (but didn't buy anything!)

In the early 1970s this was where you could get your "underground" weeklies - mostly acquired for the Fabulous Furry Freaks pages. I remember during one uni holiday Mum asking "Is there anything you want from York" before she set off. She returned with copies of both  International Times and Nasty Tales and was not amused - "Here are your dirty magazines"!

Now the supermarkets all carry newspapers and magazines; we even have a local Waterstones, and we buy music online. But this newsagent chain will be missed, just like Woolworths, which in York was on the same street, as was Timothy Whites.