In 1792, Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna established a business as news vendors in London. The same year, their son William Henry Smith was born. If you’ve reached adulthood in the UK, then even though the full name might not mean a lot to you, I’m sure that you’ll recognise the shortened version – W.H. Smith. William Henry took over the business following his parent’s deaths, and his son, young William Henry, joined, upon which the business was renamed W.H.Smith and Sons. It was the second William Henry who hit upon the idea of selling newspapers and books in the great train termini that were springing up in London by the 1840s, an idea which led to W.H.Smith becoming one of the great British retail names in the 20th century.
I still remember the excitement at getting a WH Smiths gift
voucher for Christmas. When I was growing up in suburban West London in the
1970s there were two places most of us went to buy records, or books, or
stationery and those were W.H. Smith in Ealing Broadway and Woolworth in West
Ealing (and Ealing Broadway.) W.H. Smith was generally more expensive and a bit
posher. While Woolworth’s nickname was the chummy, down to earth ‘Woolies’ , W.H.
Smith’s was the rather staid and formal ‘Smith’s’ The building in Ealing
Broadway was built upon the foundations of the Ealing Hippodrome music hall and
theatre, and the basement was incorporated into the pit which housed the stage
machinery. Woolworth was cheaper and a bit more downmarket, although it had the
advantage of being closer to home.
Woolworth in the Uk closed its doors for the last time in
2009 – although I was delighted to discover a Woolworths just around the corner
from where I was staying in East Berlin in 2017. But good old W.H. Smith just kept
on keeping on.
Yesterday, then I happened to be in the nearest city to
home, Swansea. I had a brainwave – having acquired and started to use a variety
of ‘cheap’ own brand sketchbooks, why not pop into Smiths and buy one of
theirs? So when I arrived in the Quadrant shopping centre in Swansea, I was
quite dismayed to see that W.H. Smith was no longer there. Instead, a new shop
called T.G.Jones. Yeah, okay, I probably should have put two and two together,
but it wasn’t until I entered the store and saw that almost everything was just
as it had been before that I worked it out. T.G.Jones IS W.H.Smith. Sort of.
I was able to buy this sketchbook.
All I can give you now
is my first impression since I only bought it yesterday and I have only made
one drawing in it so far. Here it is:-
It’s a true A5 and it consists of 100 pages (50 sheets) of
135gsm paper. It does feel thinner and less substantial than many of the books
I’ve used. I bought it for £7, which means that the price per page is 7p. That’s
not exorbitant, but it means it is quite a bit more expensive than some other
own brands which are cheaper and have considerably more pages.
The pages in the W.H.Smith book are a very bright white and
they have a smooth surface. In fact, it reminds me of the paper in the Derwent
Academy book. I have to say that after confining myself to the quite scratchy
surface in the Nassau book and the very scratchy surface in the Crawford and
Black book, making a drawing in this sketchbook was just a pure pleasure. There’s
absolutely no show through of the black fineliner on the other side of the page
and I have to say that I’m really rather pleased with the result. I do wish
that the pages would lie flatter when you open the book though.
In terms of construction, its covers are a fairly generic
cloth backed arrangement. It has no integral bookmark, no document pocket and
no elastic fastening. The covers could be a little more appealing but these
things aren’t that important to me and I can live without them. The important
thing is the quality of the paper.
Of course it will be a while before I’m going to be using
it on a daily basis and we’ve yet to see how it can handle coloured fineliner
or watercolour. But my first impressions are that you can do a lot worse for
your money. Mind you, I don’t know how long you’re going to be able to still buy
yourself one of these. I’ll try to explain.
W.H.Smith sold all of their stores and their non-travel
business to Modella Capital in 2025. They had rationalised that up to 80% of
their proft was coming from the travel business, so they retained their travel
stores and also retained the W.H.Smith name. So Modella needed to rebrand their
old WH Smith stores. So – W.H. becomes T.G. Smith becomes Jones. Okay. So you
can see how they would be selling off old W.H.Smith stock. But does that mean they
will then rebrand all their own brand stuff as T.G.Jones? Maybe. But on the
other hand, Modella Capital already own Hobbycraft. I’m no business guru but I
can see some crossover here. Will we see for example T.G.Jones using the
Hobbycraft own brand, Shore and Marsh, as it’s own house brand too? I don’t
know, but it has to be a possibility.
Well, time will tell about that. But what I’m thinking is
that when I finish the Nassau, being as there are only 100 pages to fill –
well, 99 now, I may well bump the Smiths sketchbook up the order and keep
piggybacking the Crawford and Black until the Smiths is finished. It’s brains
for thinking and feet for dancing.
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