How a 138-year-old joke shop fell victim to Britain’s high-street crisis

Tam Shepherds in Glasgow had survived two world wars and a pandemic – but the pressures now facing independent shops proved too much

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If it was rubber chickens or a clown’s bow tie you were after, you’d know where to find it in Glasgow. Behind a narrow shop-front on the central thoroughfare of Queen Street, Tam Shepherds Trick Shop served customers all the fake beards, fancy dress masks and squirt rings they could possibly need for 138 years.
But the independent magic and joke shop, run as a family business since 1886, announced this week that November 9 was its final day of trading from its bricks and mortar premises. The self-proclaimed “world’s oldest family-run magic and joke shop” will not quite vanish in a puff of smoke: it will endure online. But to many disappointed fans, it won’t be the same.
Among customers posting their memories, and condolences, on Facebook was a Perth-based magician called Adrian Harris, lamenting the sad news. An erstwhile prankster called Alan fondly recalled buying his first stink bombs from the store in 1968, and equally fondly reminisced about the caretaker obliged to clean up after one exploded in the lift of his building.
Another customer, Kenny, said he’d never forget being shown how to perform a card trick called the “rainbow cascade” in the store.
But others pointed to a wider problem, beyond the difficulty of finding fake spiders in ice cubes and joke severed ears in the shops now: the challenge today for small high street businesses to make ends meet.
“End of an era,” wrote one former customer. “Gonna be nothing left on the high streets at this rate that aren’t Greggs or restaurants.”
Indeed, the travails of the British high street have been well-documented over the past few years. Buffeted on all sides – by consumers switching to online retail, or favouring out of town retail parks they can drive to; by economic headwinds; and by high rates and rents – a long list of retail names big and small have been doing their own disappearing acts since Woolworths closed all its stores in 2009.
On Queen Street, there may be another factor at play. Some have found the arrival of temporary “pop-up” shops unhelpful – opening for a brief period of time, doing their business, then leaving, such stores have in many places been credited with breathing new life back into tired high streets by filling otherwise empty premises. But not everyone, it seems, welcomes the competition. “Pop-up shops are badly damaging our business,” says Pasha Ali, owner of Queen Street’s costume and alternative clothing store Damien & Lilith. His premises sits opposite the now-closed Tam Shepherds store.
The latter explained its own “sad” decision to shut its doors in a social media post. The building it occupies is to be redeveloped, it said. There are plans for almost 200 new student flats there.
Although the new development includes retail space, “uncertainty over the redevelopment, together with high costs of being a small independent shop in the city centre in the current climate” made its presence no longer sustainable, it added.
It is not alone in its plight. In the first six months of this year, on average, 38 high street businesses closed every day, data from the accountancy firm PwC suggests. But today’s retail environment is particularly challenging for independents, says analyst Jonathan De Mello, founder of JDM Retail.
“The majority of closures we’ve seen in the high street overall in UK retail have been independent retailers,” he says.
Almost 2,000 indie stores closed during the first half of 2023, according to research by the Local Data Company – reportedly the worst recorded net change for the sector since the data was first collected in 2016. The energy crisis, high interest rates, staffing challenges and the end of business rates relief schemes were cited as reasons.
Local high streets are suffering particularly as commuters return to their city centre offices post-pandemic, De Mello says.
In continuing to trade online, Tam Shepherds follows in the footsteps of many others who have given up costly high street premises to trade from the relative safety of the internet.
For newcomers, meanwhile, the internet is a far more obvious place to begin than the high street. “If I was setting up a retail business, I’d go online,” says retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth, chief executive of marketing agency Savvy. “There are no barriers to entry and you can reach a global market, as opposed to the market in Edinburgh or Headingley [in Leeds].”
Independents on the high street are suffering in 2024 for two main reasons, she says. The first is a sharp decrease in consumer confidence, which although it affects all retail businesses is felt particularly painfully by independents. The second factor is an epidemic of shoplifting.
Theft from shops in England and Wales rose to a 20-year high this year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.
“It’s a total nightmare if you’re an independent retailer at the moment,” says Shuttleworth. “People don’t understand independent retailers don’t have big profit margins. There’s no ‘it’s only a one-person shop, I won’t steal from there.’”
Add to this the threat of violence against shop workers and “running an independent business at the moment is not attractive,” she says.
On Glasgow’s Queen Street, beneath the impressive sandstone architecture of old merchant buildings, there can still be found a handful of small or independent retailers, restaurants and barbers – alongside vacant shop-fronts, garish American-style candy stores, cheap gift shops and multiple businesses selling vapes.
“We’re especially busy at Halloween,” says Ali in his costume store. “But pop-up shops are badly damaging our business. This year there were two Halloween pop-up shops on Queen Street, another one on Argyle Street and another one up on Sauchiehall Street [both also in the city centre]. They launch price wars that make it hard for us to compete. We have to pay permanent rents, all year round, even when we’re not as busy. But they turn up and only pay temporary rent when trade is busiest. It’s not fair. It’s making it hard for us to keep afloat.”
Damien & Lilith has traded on the street, opposite the joke shop’s old premises, for more than 20 years. Nearby is a deserted shop-front where one of the Halloween pop-ups had briefly set up. The windows are still covered in stickers of ghouls and bloody zombies. A hand-written note taped to the door says: “We are now closed. See you in 2025!”
Ali also says business has been hit by the introduction last year of Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone, which bans older cars and vans from a square mile of the city centre. It is far from the only city where businesses and shoppers complain of the difficulty of accessing city centre premises by car.
Further up the road, sandwiched between two brightly lit shops selling vapes, is the Fat Buddha Store, an independent gents’ outfitters selling designer clothes, shoes and men’s grooming accessories.
“The pop-ups don’t help,” agrees owner Gillian Frew. “Instead of encouraging permanent, quality retailers, all we get is more and more tacky and tawdry shops.”
She deplores the state of the street, which used to have what she calls “proper quality shops”, and is now, she says, littered with plastic bins from the flats above the stores and piles of rubbish left out by some of the businesses.
Around the country, the future looks uncertain. From next April, it is feared the planned rise in employers’ National Insurance will contribute further to the woes of bricks and mortar retailers. Some are said to be preparing to shut earlier and open on fewer days.
“Operating expenses keep climbing, with inflation driving up the National Living Wage, National Insurance contributions, and business rates,” says Andrew Goodacre, chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association. “Revenues are not keeping pace with these escalating costs, leaving many independent businesses at risk of failure.”
Without “meaningful” Government action, “we risk seeing more hollowed-out high streets across the country,” he warns.
As for consumers, we perhaps don’t always match words with actions when it comes to what we say we want to preserve and the public spaces we say we would like to inhabit. While compulsively ordering from Amazon, we mourn the loss of high street shops, especially the independents. “It’s up to us to an extent,” says Shuttleworth. “If we don’t use these shops, we will lose them.”
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