WH Smith to change into newest excessive road large to vanish – what are the others?

WH Smith’s identify will probably be erased throughout excessive streets after the 233-year-old firm bought a part of its enterprise to the proprietor of Hobbycraft.

The £76m deal will see its 480 excessive road shops rebrand as TGJones, below the possession of Modella Capital, which gained the ultimate stage of the public sale course of.

Whereas WH Smith has given up its excessive road enterprise, it should proceed its profitable journey retail arm, with 1,200 shops, primarily based primarily at airports and railway stations, in 32 nations globally.

However its erasure from UK excessive streets marks the top of an period stretching again to 1792, when the primary WH Smith was opened by Henry Walton Smith and his spouse Anna in Little Grosvenor Avenue, London.

Debenhams

Division retailer chain Debenhams, like WH Smith, was a staple of British excessive streets for hundreds of years, first opening its doorways in 1778.

However its remaining premises closed completely in Might 2021 after the corporate collapsed amid the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The retailer, which employed 20,000 folks pre-pandemic, was already struggling earlier than the outbreak, as customers moved away from conventional division retailer fashions and moved on-line.

Nevertheless, it couldn’t deal with the enforced closure of websites throughout lockdown and shortly went into administration inside weeks of the virus totally hitting the UK.

Debenhams was acquired by vogue retailer Boohoo earlier than the shops closed, and has been reworked right into a profitable online-only operation.

It is so profitable that Boohoo, within the midst of an enormous fall in revenue, has renamed itself Debenham Group.

Its chief govt Dan Finley mentioned {that a} turnaround of Debenhams was now full and the web division retailer’s up to date enterprise mannequin now accounted for almost all of group profitability.

Woolworths

As soon as one other excessive road basic, Woolworths – recognized for its decide ‘n’ combine, homeware and all the things in between – had greater than 800 shops within the UK at its peak.

The primary retailer opened in November 1909 in Liverpool, by New Yorker Frank Woolworth, who had already established the model within the US.

However virtually precisely 100 years later – 6 January 2009 – its well-known shops closed for good, simply months after the corporate sunk into administration.

Analysts blame its downfall on a poisonous mixture of low money reserves, misplaced credit score insurance coverage and crippling debt – all exacerbated by the 2008 monetary disaster.

The shops had been standard proper till the top, with the agency’s ultimate annual report displaying a slight pre-tax revenue in 2007.

However it was not sufficient to save lots of the struggling enterprise, which left 27,000 folks out of labor.

Paul Seaton, who had labored as a retailer supervisor and as a part of the IT workforce throughout 25 years on the firm, advised Sky Information: “The unhappy actuality is Woolworths took 99 years to construct, and it took 42 days from administration to the day the final door shut. Ninety-nine years of meticulous care and thought… gone.”

Ted Baker

Based by Ray Kelvin in Glasgow in 1988, Ted Baker went on to change into a preferred menswear label throughout the UK and ventured into womenswear, too.

However a torrid interval started for the retailer in 2019 when Mr Kelvin left amid claims of inappropriate behaviour in direction of colleagues.

It was subsequently pressured to situation a string of revenue warnings and accounting mishaps, having to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic from a place of monetary weak point.

In 2020, it axed a whole bunch of jobs and raised £100m to shore up its stability sheet.

Ted Baker was delisted from the London inventory market in 2022 after being purchased by Genuine, headed by the entrepreneur Jamie Salter, for about £210m.

However it by no means recovered, ultimately closing 15 of its UK shops in early 2024, earlier than closing its remaining 31 outlets in August 2024.

Simply earlier than closing all shops, house owners Genuine struck a deal with United Legwear and Attire Co (ULAC) to function an e-commerce presence for the model in Britain and Europe, so Ted Baker nonetheless has a web based retailer.

Arcadia manufacturers

The Arcadia Group, led by Sir Philip Inexperienced, employed round 13,000 folks throughout its high-street vogue manufacturers like Topshop, Topman, Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge.

After almost twenty years, the empire got here crumbling down when Sir Philip was pressured to place the group into administration within the autumn of 2020.

It was picked aside by on-line retailers, with Asos swooping in for giant names like Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT, and Boohoo taking on Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Wallis.

Arcadia’s downfall was probably the most spectacular implosions in current company historical past, forcing about 500 standalone websites to shut.

Sir Philip purchased the excessive road group in 2002 for £850m, and simply three years later paid what stays one of many largest-ever dividends – £1.2bn – to his spouse and Arcadia’s registered proprietor, Woman Tina Inexperienced.

Arcadia’s collapse got here within the midst of the pandemic, however its downfall occurred after many controversial strikes by Sir Philip.

BHS

BHS – or British Dwelling Shops – collapsed into administration in April 2016, main 11,000 staff to lose their jobs.

The model, established in 1928, closed its final 22 shops in October 2016.

Sir Philip Inexperienced additionally owned BHS after shopping for it for £200m in 2000. He bought the enterprise to Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt, in 2015 for £1.

Twenty-two thousand pensioners had been hit by a £571m black gap within the collapsed retailer’s pension fund, main MPs to push for Sir Philip to be stripped of his knighthood.

He ultimately paid £363m to settle the pension schemes, whereas Chappell was jailed for six years in 2020 for failing to pay tax on £2.2m in earnings he acquired after shopping for BHS.