The turnover figures are not good and the owner is entirely open about it. Records sell, but they sell to a narrowing group of people, most of whom he can name. What has grown — sharply, and without any deliberate effort on his part — is the number of people who come in and buy nothing at all.

Some of them are there for the listening post. A larger number are there because it is warm, because there is a chair, and because it is one of a diminishing set of indoor spaces in the neighbourhood where a person can remain for forty minutes without a transaction. The shop has become, in the technical sense, a third place: not home, not work, and not requiring you to spend money to stay.

The accidental civic function

This is happening in a great many places at once, and it is happening because the buildings that used to do this job are shut. Libraries with reduced hours. Community halls sold. Church halls under commercial lease. The functions those buildings performed did not disappear when they closed; they migrated to whatever was still open, which is increasingly a small independent business with no funding for the role and no intention of taking it on.

I did not set out to run a day centre with a stock of records. That is roughly what it is now, and I am not sure I would change it.

The economics are precarious in a way that ought to worry anyone who values the function. A civic institution has a budget line. A record shop has a rent review. The service is being provided by exactly the kind of enterprise least able to absorb the cost of providing it, and it persists largely because individual owners have decided to let it.

  • Independent retail increasingly performs social functions it is not resourced for and cannot bill for.
  • The provision is invisible in policy terms, because it appears in no service inventory.
  • It disappears at the speed of a lease, not the speed of a consultation.

On the afternoon we visit there are nine people in a shop that comfortably holds twelve. Two are buying. The rest are talking, listening, or reading the handwritten cards above the racks, which the owner updates weekly and which constitute, by some distance, the neighbourhood's most reliable source of music criticism.