21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (14 page)

So when their trusted bank, where they have placed their money all their lives, is absorbed into another company, it is a big deal, and worthy of note.

Even if you didn’t bank with Midland, you will remember their logo – a golden griffin surrounded by a circle of coins – and their slogan, ‘the listening bank’. You would have seen them in TV adverts, on billboards, and illuminated outside their branches. They really were everywhere.

And now they are nowhere, replaced by, to give them their full name, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Not quite the same, is it?

Dodo Rating:

C&A

Of course, not all chains that have vanished from our high streets have disappeared from the face of the earth completely. C&A, purveyors of reasonably priced clothes for the discerning man and woman about town, closed down their UK stores in 2001, in the face of competition from supermarkets and other discount designer chains, but across Europe they continue to be a major player.

So much so that Beyoncé (she who would have preferred you to put a ring on it) has her own clothing line in conjunction with the chain.

In the UK, brands such as Clockhouse, Palomino, and Yessica made them popular with both sexes and they were often the store that mothers didn’t mind their children buying clothes from – their ranges being cheap and relatively fashionable. Their ‘Man at C&A’ advertising campaign offered smart trousers and shirts to the impressionable teenager intent on wowing the girl at the forthcoming school disco. They were also the go-to store for cheap salopettes for school skiing trips.

The gap left by the departure of C&A was quickly filled by Primark, New Look, Matalan, and the like, so you wouldn’t really know they were ever here.

Unless, that is, you remember purchasing your first pair of waffled trousers there in 1981. As many of us do.

Dodo Rating:

Our Price

At its peak, Our Price was the second biggest music retailer in the country behind Woolworths (before then there was a time when Woolies, WH Smith, and Boots were the three largest, can you imagine?!), with over 300 stores across the country. Originally set up as a cassette specialist, the loyalty to the format continued for much of its existence, with plenty of space given over to tapes even when they were clearly on the way out.

Founded in 1972, the chain went through the hands of several owners, most notably WH Smith, who bought it in 1986, but they each managed to maintain the fairly ramshackle indie feel, helped by the wire rack displays and handwritten header cards. There was an Our Price in almost every major town, and many music lovers aged 30+ will have an LP, cassette, or CD somewhere in their collection that still bears an Our Price sticker.

During the mid-to late-’80s, Our Price faced stiff competition from the HMV chain, and the larger, bolder, and more fashionable newcomer soon overtook its smaller rival. This marked the beginning of the end. A period of rebranding as Virgin stores did nothing to reverse its fortunes and the chain finally went under in early 2004, with all the stock being sold to Oxfam.

Our Price still exists in two incarnations, however. There is an online company supplying music memorabilia to charities, and there is also an original Our Price store sitting empty in Wolverhampton city centre. It is seven years after closure, and no one has taken over the site.

I bet there is a copy of
Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 23
in there somewhere.

On cassette, obviously.

Dodo Rating:

Athena

Athena epitomised the 1980s in the same way that the Raleigh Chopper summed up the 1970s. Its product range of reproduction art prints, calendars, and novelty items was perfect for the decade that style forgot, but with ’80s fashion and music making a determined comeback, is there time for Athena to stage a revival?

It started out as an art shop in the early ’60s, but its most famous incarnation was born out of a corporate takeover and expansion programme that saw it grow to 60 stores nationwide.

Classic Athena products included
L’Enfant
, a black and white photograph of a male model holding a small baby, and the iconic
Tennis Girl
poster (you know, the one with the bare arse).

The company collapsed in 1995 and only survives through seven branches that managed to stay open following administration.

Dodo Rating:

Television Rental Shops

In the early days of television, very few people actually bought one. They were bloody expensive. Instead, people rented them from electrical stores and chains such as Radio Rentals, Rediffusion, or Rumbelows (there must have been some law that meant they had to begin with the letter R). For a small amount each week you could have a brand-spanking-new Bush or Ferguson sitting in the corner of your living room on which you could watch the wrestling, or
One Man and his Dog
, perhaps. When your rental period expired, you could upgrade to a new model.

Rental companies, who could also let you have anything from a fridge-freezer to a video recorder, experienced a massive slump in business in the 1990s when technology became cheaper and consumers, in the main, opted to buy their entertainment systems outright. It became very rare to see a rental shop on the high street.

This was a real problem for many married men for whom a TV rental store window display was the only way to catch up on the football scores while out shopping with the wife on a Saturday afternoon.

We may be about to come full circle, however. The speed at which televisual technology is advancing means that your £2,000 42” HD LCD monitor is pretty much out of date the moment you buy it. People are coming back round to the idea of shelling out a few quid a week in return for a cutting edge TV which they can exchange for a bigger, better, and newer one at the end of a year.

Husbands, your weekend shopping trips may not be a trauma for much longer.

Dodo Rating:

Fish and Chips Wrapped in Newspaper

Until the middle of the 1980s, anything you ordered from your local fish and chip shop would come wrapped in newspaper. The practice was outlawed by those party poopers at Health and Safety for fear that ingesting newsprint would be bad for our health.

Now, I have a few things to say about that.

Firstly, the fish and chips were never actually placed directly into newspaper. There was usually some sort of greaseproof lining or paper bag between the grub and the headlines, so it was very unlikely that any ink would get on the chips.

And, even if it did, there is absolutely no research suggesting that it was bad for your health anyway.

But my biggest issue is with the replacement. Instead of newspapers, we now have cardboard cones printed with fake newspaper headlines, or polystyrene trays, and they are both pants.

And then there is the old saying, usually spoken by a politician or celebrity who has just taken a thumping from the press, that ‘today’s headlines are tomorrow’s chip wrappers’, which just doesn’t make sense any more, however true the sentiment may be.

Dodo Rating:

Keeping CDs Behind the Counter

They were called masterbags. Cardboard sleeves that record stores kept behind the counter which held the popular CDs, tapes, and LPs of the time.

The covers and cases were out on the shop floor. Empty.

You, the customer, would select your copy of
Stars
by Simply Red on CD, or
Circus
by Erasure on cassette, take the case up to the counter, and the dodgy, looking bloke at the till would vanish amidst a network of shelves and cubby holes to locate the innards for you, quietly muttering to himself about your shite taste in music.

I know, I was that dodgy-looking bloke.

Working in record shops in the ’80s and ’90s meant a great deal of rooting around in a sea of masterbags to find the customer’s selection. This was usually a relatively simple process with most CDs, which were filed in alphabetical order by artist (ignoring any instances of The or A in the band name, unless the band name was The The, in which case you were best not ignoring it, to be honest). The name being written on the edge of the cardboard sleeve made it easy to flick through.