Closed shop

In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street.
 
Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you rise!/ Swamping all before your eyes…’ spoke for many, though J.R. Johnson thinks that the roots of destruction go deeper, pre-dating the advent of the net.
 
The winners earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30.

Hear their doors and cash-tills close,
Play their dirges, sing their blues,
Dolcis Shoes and Bargain Booze,
Ottakar’s and Rumbelows.
 
Each a loser, once a winner,
Laid low by a store bacillus —
Where are Freeman, Hardy, Willis,
Where is Lilley, where is Skinner?
 
Soon they’ll vanish altogether
Like Lipton, Dillons, Dunn and Co. —
Even Past Times had to go
With Littlewood’s and Land of Leather.
 
Where assistants leant and dreamt,
Tumbleweed blows idly through:
Fine Fare, Netto, Comet too —
Even Poundworld’s not exempt.