The newsagent is the small shop on the corner that opens before everything else, sells newspapers and magazines, and has over time acquired sweets, drinks, cigarettes, bread, milk, greetings cards, lottery tickets and a cash machine.
It is also called the corner shop, the paper shop, or simply by the family name over the door.
What they sell
The core stock is newspapers and magazines, laid out on the floor and racked on the wall, but the business has long since diversified out of necessity:
- Confectionery — including the pick-and-mix and the “penny sweets” that shaped every British childhood.
- Cigarettes and tobacco — now legally required to be hidden behind shutters.
- Milk, bread and basic groceries at a markup, for when the supermarket is shut.
- National Lottery tickets and scratchcards.
- Top-ups, parcels and payment services — many now double as a parcel collection point or a post office counter.
The paper round
A genuine British institution and the first job of generations of teenagers. Children can legally work from age 13 in Britain under strict rules — no work before 7am or after 7pm, limited hours, and a permit from the local council — and delivering newspapers before school is the classic example.
The paper boy or girl collects a bag of marked-up papers at around six in the morning, walks a route, pushes each one through a letterbox, and is paid a modest weekly sum. The bag is always too heavy, the weather is usually poor, and the memory is fond in inverse proportion to how much anyone enjoyed it at the time.
Numbers have collapsed with print circulation, and the paper round is now genuinely uncommon rather than universal.
Who runs them
A very large proportion of British corner shops are family businesses, and a striking share have been run by British Asian families — particularly of Indian, Pakistani and East African Asian origin — since the 1960s and 70s. The Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972, many of whom arrived in Britain with nothing, went into retail in significant numbers.
The corner shop became, for several communities, both a livelihood and a route into British high streets, and the hours involved are punishing: open early, close late, seven days.
The pressure
Newsagents have had a hard forty years. Newspaper and magazine sales have fallen enormously, supermarkets and their convenience formats have taken the grocery trade, tobacco display bans and duty rises have hit a once-reliable margin, and the multiples have moved into the same streets.
Those that survive have generally done so by becoming something else — a convenience store, a parcel hub, a coffee stop, a post office — while keeping the papers by the door for the customers who have bought one there every morning for forty years.