The Wincanton shop with fans on every continent

In 2000 Bernard and Isobel Pearson opened a shop in Wincanton that sold one thing, Discworld: books, figurines, maps and anything else a fan of Terry Pratchett's novels might want. Pratchett backed the idea and made the Discworld Emporium the honorary consulate of Ankh-Morpork, the city at the heart of the books.

Then it got stranger.

In 2002 Wincanton became the first town in the world to be officially twinned with a fictional place. In 2007 a new housing estate was given street names from the novels, Treacle Mine Road among them. A small Somerset market town had a following on every continent, and almost all of it came through one shop.

I did go in. Hogswatch, the Discworld's version of Christmas, was celebrated in the town every year, with "Characters from Pratchett's fictional world" wandering the streets, as the Wincanton Window described it in 2012. What I remember of the shop: a cat in the window and, if my memory's right, Terry Pratchett himself, now and then. When he wasn't, his right-hand man would tell stories about what had inspired the books, and was wonderfully friendly to children and adults alike.

In 2020 the Pearsons retired and the shop on the high street closed, though the Emporium carries on online.

A warning, or a lesson?

It would be easy to read the closure as a warning, as if even a shop this distinctive couldn't survive on a high street. I read it the other way round. The Emporium's customers were never mainly local: they were Discworld readers all over the world, ordering by post. In the terms that matter to a lease, it was an online retailer with a shopfront. So when the founders stepped back, the sensible thing was to keep the part that never depended on the building, and that's what happened. Shops that live on local trade face quite different sums, and that's the story of Wincanton's high street.

For any small or medium business, the shop leaves two lessons. Being known for one specific thing travels further than being pleasant to everyone, which is the same principle as explaining what you do in one sentence, at a scale most of us will never reach. And a reputation can outlive the premises, as the town itself shows: Wincanton is still formally twinned with Ankh-Morpork, and the street names are still there. Nor is it the first time Wincanton's name has travelled further than the town, because a national haulage company still carries it.

If you run a shop in Wincanton today, our page for Somerset businesses covers being found by the people searching nearby.