Popular town centre store to close for good after 125 years in another blow to high street
A POPULAR high street store is set to close its doors for good, after 125 years in business, in another huge blow to the high street.
The family-run newsagents touched the lives of many in the century and a quarter it was in business, so much so that 80 former employees returned to the store for a huge send-off.
Burrows, in Ely Cambridgeshire first opened back in 1900, but will now shut up shop for the final time, after owner Jeff Burrows, 76, made the decision to retire.
Upon announcing the closure, Mr Burrows and his niece Annabel Reddick, who works in the shop, put a call out on social media, asking for former employees to come to the newsagents at 9 am on Saturday.
Annabel described the response they received as “incredible.”
“I thought we’d get about 15 or twenty if we were lucky”, she told the BBC.
Among those who attended the reunion, was a man who helped deliver papers back in the 1950s and a woman who had come all the way from Manchester.
“Many of them wrote down their memories, thanking Jeff and saying it was a great start to their working life,” Annabel said.
“Jeff and my granddad had a tradition of having hot cross buns for the paper boys and girls at Easter – they’d buy big trays of them – so we did the same and served them all buns from Boswell and Son Bakers on Saturday.”
Despite their being many more attendees than expected, the duo thankfully had enough buns to go round.
Burrows is open every day of the year except Christmas Day, and has a staff of around 20 teenagers delivering papers to 700 loyal customers.
The newsagents has remained a cash-only business, and is an integral part of the local community.
Burrows was set up by Jeff’s grandfather James Frederick, before being passed on to Jeff’s father Percy Burrows, who ran the business until 1973.
Jeff was just 25 when he took over the business and said that he has worked every day apart from Christmas Day for the last 20 years.
During the 52 years that Jeff ran Burrows he believes he has employed over 500 paper boys and girls.
The youngsters were mostly aged between 13 and 16, and Jeff described them as “good as gold.”
Why are retailers closing stores?
RETAILERS have been feeling the squeeze since the pandemic, while shoppers are cutting back on spending due to the soaring cost of living crisis.
High energy costs and a move to shopping online after the pandemic are also taking a toll, and many high street shops have struggled to keep going.
However, additional costs have added further pain to an already struggling sector.
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury’s hike to employer NICs from April will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
At the same time, the minimum wage will rise to £12.21 an hour from April, and the minimum wage for people aged 18-20 will rise to £10 an hour, an increase of £1.40.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: “The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025.”
It comes after almost 170,000 retail workers lost their jobs in 2024.
End-of-year figures compiled by the Centre for Retail Research showed the number of job losses spiked amid the collapse of major chains such as Homebase and Ted Baker.
It said its latest analysis showed that a total of 169,395 retail jobs were lost in the 2024 calendar year to date.
This was up 49,990 – an increase of 41.9% – compared with 2023.
It is the highest annual reading since more than 200,000 jobs were lost in 2020 in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced retailers to shut their stores during lockdowns.
The centre said 38 major retailers went into administration in 2024, including household names such as Lloyds Pharmacy, Homebase, The Body Shop, Carpetright and Ted Baker.
Around a third of all retail job losses in 2024, 33% or 55,914 in total, resulted from administrations.
Experts have said small high street shops could face a particularly challenging 2025 because of Budget tax and wage changes.
Professor Bamfield has warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
“By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer’s household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020.”
Burrows will close for good on April 26, and its paper round has been sold to a national company.
The closure of the beloved newsagent is just one of many closures to batter the high street in recent weeks.
A combination of rising business costs, a shift towards online shopping and the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, have all been blamed for the death of the high street.
Hobbycraft has announced plans to close nine UK stores, putting 126 jobs at risk.
On Tuesday, legendary retailer HMV shut the doors of its store in Oxford after its landlord refused to renew the lease.
Shoppers were left gutted this week by the news that a 154 year old jewellery which became one of the UK’s first Rolex retailers was shutting up shop.
And bargain heaven Poundland is set to shut three stores permanently before the end of May.