Iconic UK retailer sells all 500 of its stores with name set to vanish from high street
A household name which has been open across the UK for more than 200 years will disappear within months in another sign of retail woes.
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One of the most iconic retail names in Britain – which also has stores throughout Australia – will vanish from UK streets after more than two centuries.
It comes as well-known retailers from around the world are shutting up shop – from the US’ Kmart and the UK’s Debenhams to Australia’s Jeanswest.
But WHSmith isn’t going bust. Far from it, the chain remains profitable – it’s even growing.
Yet on Friday, local time, WHSmith announced it had sold all 480 of its UK’s high street stores to private equity firm Modella Capital for $157 million.
The well-known brand name was not part of the deal.
That will mean the stores will be rebranded to the completely made up name of “TGJones”. It’s already been derided as “idiotic”.
Henry Walton Smith started selling books, magazines, stationery and chocolate bars to Brits in the 18th century. The first store opened in 1792 on Little Grosvenor Street in London’s ritzy Mayfair neighbourhood.
The business was taken over by his son William Henry Smith who renamed it as WH Smith & Son in 1846.
Its success was driven by the advent of the railway age with WHSmith book stands opening on station platforms across Britain.
Firm doing well, high street stores less so
In recent years, Post Offices have moved into almost 200 WHSmith branches and it’s also become the UK home of relaunched toy retailer Toys R US.
The shops, which are a mainstay of most major towns and cities throughout the UK, still make money.
But for years, the company’s high street stores have seen their sales decline as people buy fewer magazines and get other products including books from specialist stores or online. The stores being sold make up a dwindling amount of WHSmith’s overall income.
WHSmith has said it instead wants to concentrate on its far more profitable travel business which has stores worldwide in airports, railway stations and hospitals.
These 1200 stores – from the UK to the US, Australia to India – mostly trade under the WHSmith name and will continue to do so.
“While profitable and cash generative, the UK High Street business has become an increasingly smaller part of the WHSmith Group,” the company said in a statement,
“In the financial year ended 31 August 2024, 75 per cent of the Group’s revenue and 85 per cent of its trading profit came from its Travel business.”
As well as the overseas stores, WHSmith will retain 580 smaller UK stores in travel hubs like Heathrow Airport and London’s Kings Cross station which will also continue to trade under the historic brand.
WHSmith to remain in Australia
In Australia, WHSmith has stores in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide airports and a number of railway stations.
It also operates coffee shops and food stores under different names in scores of Australian hospitals.
These will all remain open and within the WHSmith Group.
‘Idiotic’ name pilloried
Modella already owns a number of UK retailers and it said it will be “business as usual” for the stores’ 5000 staff. But retail watchers have suggested as many as half the stores could eventually be shuttered.
In an email to staff Modella explained the thinking behind the name TGJones.
“As a very well-known surname in the UK, Jones feels like a worthy successor to Smith and carries the same sense of family, appropriate for a store visited by everyone and there for everyone,” it stated.
The company said it would retain the familiar blue colour while a filing with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office of the new trademark shows even the font may be identical to WHSmith.
Many online have rubbished the new name.
“TGJones? Sounds like something they’d call WHSmith in a comedy show because they couldn’t get permission to use the name,” said one on X.
“TGJones sounds like someone stuck in a brainstorming meeting at 3am, desperately trying to come up with a name that isn’t ‘WH Smith,’” said another.
“The new name being TGJones to attempt to echo the WHSmith name is the silliest goddamn thing I’ve heard in ages.”
“Idiotic... brain dead idea,” simply said one commenter.
Others, however, were more melancholy due to the loss of such a well-known brand name from British towns.
“Magazines shaped the direction of my life, and WH Smith were their church. It’s another key day for the UK high street as we knew it,” said Daniel Dawkins on social media.
It won’t be the first time UK town centres have lost iconic retail names. Debenhams department stores vanished in 2021 and Topshop in 2020. Both tried to make it in Australia – and failed.
The UK’s Safeway vanished when it was taken over by a rival supermarket in 2005. And Woolworths, a variety store with no connection to Australia’s Woolworths, went to the wall in 2009.
In the US, discount department store Kmart is down to a single US mainland store as rivals like Target, TKMaxx and Walmart tempted all its customers away.
Just this week, Jeanswest said it would close all 90 of its stores after a years-long battle to make the brand more relevant. Around 600 jobs will be lost.
It comes on the heels of Ally Fashion being ordered into liquidation last month, costing 250 jobs, and follows last year’s collapse of Mosaic brands, which led to more than 3000 job losses across stores including Katie’s, Millers, Rockmans and Rivers.
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