says
Aged and infirm of purpose
says
Aged and infirm of purpose
Member
Folks,
I touched on this in another thread but I thought it might be worthwhile to ask the question straight out. Does anyone know of a genuine table tennis retail outlet anywhere in the UK ? By that I mean somewhere where you can walk in off the street and buy TT gear. Such places used to exist; I knew of one London-based table tennis specialist shop, and some of the larger general sports shops used to have a reasonable selection too.
Nowadays, so far as I can tell, there is no longer any such outlet anywhere in the country. Most of the table tennis specialist internet/mail order businesses (apart from Tees) seem to be run from private houses and the only general sports shops left are the Sports Direct stores, which as we all know are not sports shops at all but merely clothes shops with a few tennis rackets shoved into a corner. Even my local John Lewis doesn't bother with a proper sports department any more.
By comparison, in the 90s and early 00s I played a fair bit of cricket - also a bit of a niche sport, but still boasting a number of specialist retailers whom you can visit and choose a bat, pads, whites and pretty much anything else you might require without being forced to pick them out of a catalogue/web page.
So - am I right, or have I missed something ? Over to you !
John
I touched on this in another thread but I thought it might be worthwhile to ask the question straight out. Does anyone know of a genuine table tennis retail outlet anywhere in the UK ? By that I mean somewhere where you can walk in off the street and buy TT gear. Such places used to exist; I knew of one London-based table tennis specialist shop, and some of the larger general sports shops used to have a reasonable selection too.
Nowadays, so far as I can tell, there is no longer any such outlet anywhere in the country. Most of the table tennis specialist internet/mail order businesses (apart from Tees) seem to be run from private houses and the only general sports shops left are the Sports Direct stores, which as we all know are not sports shops at all but merely clothes shops with a few tennis rackets shoved into a corner. Even my local John Lewis doesn't bother with a proper sports department any more.
By comparison, in the 90s and early 00s I played a fair bit of cricket - also a bit of a niche sport, but still boasting a number of specialist retailers whom you can visit and choose a bat, pads, whites and pretty much anything else you might require without being forced to pick them out of a catalogue/web page.
So - am I right, or have I missed something ? Over to you !
John
