Harold Moores are closed to all business from Monday 16th August to Wednesday 8th September. Their landlord is renovating the shop. When I passed, there was a skip with a lot of discarded lp's in it.
Absolutely incredible! If the 'strategy' was wanton disposal of stock and fittings, they could have advertised the fact that it was freely available to collectors on a time-limited basis and saved themselves the cost of hiring a skip!
This story is sadly reminiscent of the wholesale destruction of publishers' archives which took place through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Lewis Foreman has written articles on the subject, including
Lost and Only Sometimes Found (an abbreviated version of which can be read at
http://www.ism.org/news_campaigns/article/lost_and_only_sometimes_found/): when Novello's moved from Wardour Street composer-annotated proof copies of works by Dvorak, Gounod, Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, etc. were left to rot on the pavement in readiness for waste-collection. Staggering, and (you would think) beyond belief - but clearly the "if in doubt, chuck it out" mentality is alive and well.
