It will be sad day when shop shuts after 122 years
FAMILY BUSINESS IS AT THE HEART OF THE CARLTON COMMUNITY
THE owner of a 122-year-old shop was brought to tears by customers’ reactions after she announced she was closing the beloved family business.
Whiten’s News in Westdale Lane, Carlton, has been run by the Whiten family since 1902, but on Saturday, the newsagents will close permanently.
Janet Whiten, 77, said the “incredibly hard decision” was mostly motivated by her need to care for her husband Barry, who has vascular dementia.
“It’s been a very, very, hard decision and ever since I stopped working in the shop after Barry’s dementia diagnosis I’ve missed it a lot,” said Mrs Whiten, who has had been serving customers there for 52 years.
The shop, which was started by Barry’s grandfather more than a century ago, had its beginnings in what Mrs Whiten called a “little wooden hut” before moving into the building it still occupies today. “It’s a completely different world now to when it opened. I can’t imagine how many customers have come into the shop.”
Mrs Whiten said she had become good friends with customers and thought of staff “like they were family”.
When news of the shop’s upcoming closure was shared on Facebook, locals were quick show their support and share fond memories. “Oh gosh, I was absolutely overwhelmed and I sobbed my socks off,” Mrs Whiten said. “I’m not on Facebook but my daughter sent me a load of screenshots and I said ‘don’t send me any more – I’ve sat and blubbered for an hour while I’ve read them all’
“I’m keeping out of there on the last day because I’ll just be a blubbering mess. I cry with everybody when they come in with problems, so I can’t be in on the closing day.
“You don’t realise what you mean to people, but it has been that sort of shop where if an old lady can’t fill a form in she would get some help from us.
“The staff used to call it my counselling stall in the back – if somebody’s husband had left them, or God knows what else, I would listen to their tales.”
Janet, who left bike maker Raleigh’s offices to join her husband’s family shop in 1972, said her four grandsons had grown up around the business.
“It has been a way of life. We went down there every day seven days a week, apart from Christmas Day. It’s a hard life in one respect, but I’ve enjoyed it, so it doesn’t seem that way.
“I’m proud of everyone that has worked here too, all my old paperboys come back and see me still after all these years. One of them is a Grenadier Guard, another is in the police, and when me and my daughter went to get her a new car we went to another one of the old paperboys to buy it.”
Mrs Whiten said it would have been “incredibly difficult” to keep the shop going for much longer, citing declining footfall and rising costs – she had not sold Easter eggs this year because she said supermarkets were selling them cheaper than she could buy them. “When you get to my age – in a couple of years I’ll be 80 – so I shouldn’t be going on,” Mrs Whiten laughed, before adding: “We’re very proud of it all. You don’t think about it all at the time but reading what my daughter or other people have written about the shop it’s really got to me how much people have cared.”
All my old paperboys come back and see me still after all these years Janet Whiten