When I left school I didn’t go into employment or university. I went to Jumbo Records in Leeds. It wasn’t a formal relationship. I wasn’t working there. I wasn’t even spending much money there, but as a daily destination to fill my time on the dole it was well worth the five-mile-round walk.

Back then, Jumbo was a tiny, one-unit record shop. It had white bay windows either side of the door—one with a singles display, the other with albums. Budget determined that my window shopping was strictly limited to the singles window. Inside, there were record sleeves everywhere, posters advertising forthcoming concerts, lists of rare records they had in stock, and keen customers asking for cool, classic and hard-to-find vinyl. If John Peel or Robbie Vincent had played it, they had it.
As record shops go, it was one of the best. And as an education for someone wanting to work for music papers, the Jumbo soundtrack couldn’t have been better. I bought singles by Joy Division, The Redskins and Womack & Womack. When I created a fanzine, they sold it for me, and when I formed a band, they stocked our concert tapes.

For me, and many others, it was pretty much the most important place in the city. I went back to Leeds recently and found myself in Jumbo chatting to the owner, Hunter. Listening to the music playing, I realised how brilliant it had been to immerse myself in it 25 years ago. As Hunter told me about the plans for the shop’s future and I told him about my son loving music, I realised that Jumbo—as much as anywhere—felt like home. My schools have been closed or knocked down, my mum died, other relatives moved away, my father doesn’t live in any of the houses I grew up in, but Jumbo—even though it had expanded and moved closer to the city centre—was the same. It was still a thriving space run by people who love music.

Which is the point of this month’s column: we should cherish and support the independent shops we love while they’re still here because they’re disappearing fast.
This week I discovered that Preposterous Presents in Upper Street in London’s Islington had turned into another blasted pine furniture shop. Preposterous Presents was a joke shop, a fancy dress shop and a card and gift shop rolled into one. You could buy fake vampire teeth, wigs, cowboy hats, snappers that bang when you throw them on the floor, and pretty much anything you need for a children’s party, a festival, or a day disrupting work at the office. It had a little card saying it had been there for 25 years, and the owner took great pride in all his cheap and cheerful products.

Over the last few years I’ve been disappointed to find this happening again and again: the steady disappearance of unique shops that the curious customer would
discover and come to rely on. There was the stationery shop in Farringdon that doubled as a model-car shop—the perfect place to buy a stapler, some envelopes and a miniature Batmobile. No explanation as to why such a commercial mash-up existed.
Just around the corner was the bookshop run by the grumpy, bearded George Best lookalike. He had a brilliant collection of factual and photographic books. Having failed to find anything for my dad online or in chain bookshops, I decided to try the guy opposite Farringdon Tube. “Second aisle along the middle shelf,” he said, and sure enough there it was­—an obscure book about a theatre director. Meanwhile, the guy in his cubbyhole counter was grinning. “That’s never happened before,”
he said. “Someone coming in and asking for a rare book and knowing I definitely had it.”

About a decade ago I was lying on a beach with a big cheque and no job, wondering what to do. I decided to see if I could invest in the Farringdon bookshop.
I went back there and it had gone. Disappeared because the rents had soared.
Last autumn, in Filey, North Yorkshire, where they filmed the TV series Sugartown, I was horrified to discover Sterchi’s, a tiny chocolate retailer with an accompanying bread shop (my late mum’s favourite) had shut down. After she had died I’d had a strange psychic experience in there, and now people were walking past, shocked and muttering. Only later did we discover that it was just the bread shop that had closed—the chocolate shop had moved round the corner.
All of these examples made me realise how proud we should be of our nation of small shopkeepers, especially those that go out of their way to inject some care, passion and personality into their business. I’m glad Jumbo and Sterchi’s are still there. Somehow, these places have played important micro-parts in my life. They are the roots of the things I love.

 You can follow James on Twitter @jamesjamesbrown.

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