★ Britain's oldest surviving record shop · since 1952 · Bromsgrove Street

Proposal · prepared for The Diskery, 19 May 2026.

A free, fully-built proposal for The Diskery, Birmingham. Founded 1952 by Morris Hunting on Moor Street, at 99-102 Bromsgrove Street since 1972, now in the hands of Lee Dearn and Liam Scully. Three findings, a live rebuild at /preview/, fixed pricing.

Open live preview ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal

Address · 99-102 Bromsgrove Street, Birmingham B5 6QB Founded · 1952 by Morris Hunting Owner · Lee Dearn, with manager Liam Scully

The Diskery shopfront at 99-102 Bromsgrove Street, Birmingham, with painted blue-on-cream signwriting and the corner Bromsgrove St sign visible

99-102 Bromsgrove Street · since 1972

Founded 1952 by Morris Hunting. 100,000 records, 12,000 shellac 78s. Open the live preview ↗

Current state of play

There is no live site to compare against. That is the finding.

Most of these proposals start with a side-by-side scrub of the prospect's live website against a proposed rebuild. The Diskery does not have a live website. thediskery.com redirects to a HugeDomains for-sale page. thediskery.co.uk does not resolve. The shop's public face is the Facebook page, plus the Discogs and Instagram listings. The rebuild is therefore not a redesign of a bad site; it is the first site The Diskery has ever had.

Today · what the web has on The Diskery

Platform: NONE. No website at all.
Primary URL: thediskery.com, parked at HugeDomains, listed for sale.
Alt URL: thediskery.co.uk, does not resolve (ECONNREFUSED).
Public face: Facebook page (facebook.com/TheDiskery), Discogs profile, Instagram (@the_diskery).
SEO: No Organization / MusicStore / FAQ schema anywhere The Diskery controls.
Email signup: None.
Commerce: None online, and by design (Lee Dearn, 2019: "If I wanted to sell records on the internet, why own a record shop?").

Proposed · thediskery.co.uk

Framework: Astro static site (Astro 6), fast on 3G, zero JS for the brochure pages.
Hosting: Vercel edge network, sub-100ms first-byte across the UK.
TLS: Vercel-managed Let's Encrypt, auto-renewed indefinitely.
CMS surface: Markdown for editorial; a small Sanity for "new in this week" if Lee wants it. No CMS at all if not.
SEO: Organization + MusicStore + FAQPage schema baked in at build time.
Commerce: None. Brochure model, by design. A "we don't sell online" page that says exactly why.
Email signup: Buttondown for the Record Store Day allocation list. Optional.

Three findings, in order of priority

What 74 years without a website is costing.

A walk-through of every Diskery-adjacent web page on 19 May 2026. There is no live site at thediskery.com or thediskery.co.uk; the parked-domain redirect and the directory-listing pile-up are the findings.

01

Britain's oldest surviving record shop has no website at all.

Observation: The Diskery was founded in 1952 by jazz collector Morris Hunting, has traded continuously for 74 years, and moved exactly once (Hurst Street to Bromsgrove Street, 1972). It is older than every chain record store in Britain, every supermarket music section, and every streaming service combined. It has never had a website. thediskery.com currently redirects to a HugeDomains parking page that lists the domain for sale. thediskery.co.uk does not resolve at all (ECONNREFUSED). The shop's entire web presence is the Facebook page at facebook.com/TheDiskery, plus a Discogs record-store profile and an Instagram account.
Impact: Every search for "oldest record shop Birmingham", "rare vinyl Birmingham", "78rpm jazz UK" returns Yelp, Yell, Cylex, FindOpen and an InYourPocket directory listing before it returns anything The Diskery actually owns. The HugeDomains for-sale page for thediskery.com sits inside the top fifteen Google results for "the diskery", a literal "this domain is for sale" page about Britain's oldest record shop. New crate-diggers visiting Birmingham for the weekend find third-party listings of varying accuracy. AI assistants asked "where is the oldest record shop in Britain" cannot cite a canonical source because none exists.
Cause: A small, very busy shop where Lee Dearn, Paul Dearn, Liam Scully and Danny Young are on the floor six days a week, and the energy goes into stock, not software. Facebook is the easiest channel; Discogs handles the catalogue overlap; everything else has been deferred for several years.
After rebuild: After rebuild: thediskery.co.uk becomes a real one-page-plus-deep-pages site. Hero says "Britain's oldest surviving independent record shop, since 1952" in serif type tall enough to read from the pavement. Sections cover the act-of-revenge founding story, the 100,000-records stock, the 12,000 shellac 78s, the wind-up gramophones, the hours, the location. The Facebook page keeps doing what it does best (daily posts, gigs, RSD announcements); the site catches everyone who searches Google instead of Facebook.

02

74 years of trading and the founding story is not online anywhere The Diskery controls.

Observation: The act-of-revenge origin story is one of the best founding anecdotes in British retail. Morris Hunting walked into a competing Birmingham record shop called Mansell's, was ordered to leave his bag at the counter, was publicly accused of being there to steal records, and used a road-accident compensation cheque to open The Diskery in direct competition with the explicit intention of showing Birmingham how a record shop should treat its customers. This story currently lives on Graham Jones's Vinyl Revival blog (2021), in Long Live Vinyl (2019), and in the memory of long-serving staff. None of it is on a Diskery-controlled web page.
Impact: For a 74-year-old shop, the founding story is the single most valuable piece of marketing asset there is. It is the lede of every press feature, every Birmingham music tourism trail, every "best record shops in Britain" list. With no canonical source The Diskery controls, every journalist re-writing the story is one paraphrase further from the source. AI assistants will inevitably re-write it again until the original Mansell's detail is sanded off.
Cause: No website means no place for the story to live. Facebook is structurally bad at long-form heritage copy; it scrolls past in 48 hours.
After rebuild: After rebuild: a /story page that tells the 1952 founding (the Mansell's humiliation, the road-accident compensation, the Moor Street first premises, the 1972 move to Bromsgrove Street, Morris Hunting's death in 2012, Lee and Paul Dearn taking on the lease, Liam Scully's 47 years on the counter, Danny Young's reggae buying). Permanent, indexable, citeable. Journalists begin sourcing from the shop instead of paraphrasing each other.

03

No Organization, MusicStore or LocalBusiness schema exists for The Diskery anywhere on the web.

Observation: A crawl of every Diskery-adjacent page (the Facebook page, the Discogs profile, the directory listings on Yell and Cylex and FindOpen and InYourPocket) surfaces no schema.org markup that The Diskery itself owns. No Organization with foundingDate 1952 and founder Morris Hunting. No MusicStore subtype of LocalBusiness with the Bromsgrove Street address, the 0121 622 2219 phone, the Mon-Sat 09:30-18:00 hours, the Sunday closure. No FAQPage on the buy-collections / 78s / mail-order questions. The world-record-of-sorts credential (Britain's oldest surviving independent record shop) lives in body copy on third-party sites only.
Impact: "Record shop Birmingham", "vinyl Birmingham", "oldest record shop Britain", "where to buy 78s Birmingham" are queries increasingly answered by AI assistants and Google rich results reading structured data first. The shop that is literally Britain's oldest surviving independent record shop should win every one of those queries by default. Without schema, generic chain pages with thinner credentials but well-formed markup will continue to outrank it.
Cause: No website means no schema. The shop has never had a developer.
After rebuild: After rebuild: Organization with foundingDate 1952, founder Morris Hunting, with mention of Lee Dearn and Liam Scully. MusicStore + LocalBusiness with Bromsgrove Street address, openingHours Mo-Sa 09:30-18:00 (no Sunday entry), telephone 0121 622 2219, priceRange. FAQPage with the customer questions. Person schema for Morris Hunting as founder, Lee Dearn as owner. Google and AI assistants begin citing The Diskery on the Birmingham vinyl query set within weeks of launch.

Pricing

Fixed for the rebuild. No hourly billing.

One fee for the full build, an optional monthly for hosting and ongoing care, and an optional chatbot bolted onto the FAQ. No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.

• One round of revisions before launch
• DNS cutover handled (you keep the domain in your name)
• 30 days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost
• Source code handed over on day 60 (you own everything)

Build

Full Astro rebuild + story page + schema

Homepage anchored on the 1952 founding. /story page covering the act-of-revenge origin. /stock, /visit, /faq pages. Organization + MusicStore + FAQPage schema. Map embed. Two-to-three week turnaround.

£2,000

fixed · one-off

Care

Hosting + ongoing care

Vercel hosting, SSL renewal (automatic, forever), monthly content updates, schema maintenance, monthly analytics email. Cancel any time, one line by email.

£150

/ month · cancel any time

Optional

Embedded FAQ chatbot

Trained on the FAQ and the stock pages. Answers visitor questions about hours, stock, parking, buy-collections without you typing a thing. Strictly optional.

£50

/ month · optional

Timeline · three phases

Two to three weeks, plus a slow tail of tweaks.

Phase 1 · Week 1

Claim the domain, tell the story

● Register thediskery.co.uk (or rescue thediskery.com from HugeDomains if Lee wants to fight for it).
● Build the homepage anchored on "Britain's oldest surviving record shop, since 1952".
● Write the /story page (the act-of-revenge founding, the 1972 move, the Dearn-family takeover, the 47-year Liam Scully tenure).
● Migrate the Facebook backlink, the Discogs link, the Instagram link to point at the new domain.

Phase 2 · Week 2

Stock, hours and location

● Build /stock, the four pillars (vinyl, 78s, gramophones, in-shop-only).
● Build /visit, address, phone, hours, parking, the corner-of-Bristol-Street-and-Bromsgrove-Street geography.
● Embed a real Google Maps tile.
● Photograph the shopfront and at least one window of stock if Lee is happy.

Phase 3 · Week 3+

Schema, optional newsletter, handover

● Organization + MusicStore + FAQPage schema across the site.
● Optional Buttondown signup for Record Store Day and "new in this week" mailers, only if Lee wants it.
● Analytics dashboard, monthly content updates, handover of the source code on day 60.

Cardiff developer based in Switzerland, all comms by email. Happy to visit Bromsgrove Street for sign-off and photography; not a condition. Phone +447884442651 for anything urgent during the build.

FAQ

Five questions the world's oldest record shop is right to ask.

If any answer needs a follow-up call, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days.

The shop has been fine without a website for 74 years. Why now? +

It has been fine. The case for a website now is not commerce, because the shop is explicitly not an online shop and you have said so on the record. The case is preservation and discoverability. The 1952 founding story currently lives on other people's websites, the parked thediskery.com domain redirects to a for-sale page, and the queries "oldest record shop Birmingham" and "Britain's oldest record shop" are won by directory listings the shop does not own. A simple brochure site fixes both. It does not ask The Diskery to start selling online, and it does not change anything about how the shop runs day to day.

Will this turn The Diskery into an online record shop? +

No, and the rebuild explicitly says so. The proposed homepage carries the Lee Dearn quote ("If I wanted to sell records on the internet, why own a record shop in the first place?") in a callout. The site is a brochure, a story page, an hours page and a how-to-find-us page. There is no shopping cart, no online stock listing and no mail-order form. If you ever change your mind on commerce that is a separate conversation.

Who writes the founding story and the stock copy? I am not a writer. +

I write the first draft from the Long Live Vinyl piece, the Graham Jones blog and the Ikon Gallery feature, plus a 45-minute phone call with you to fill in the bits that have never been printed. You read it back, mark up anything that is wrong or that you would say differently, I rewrite it. Two rounds and it is done. The first draft is yours to keep regardless of whether we ship the site.

I do not have a brand or a logo. Is that a problem? +

No. The painted signwriting on the fascia is the brand. Deep blue lettering, cream fascia, the vertical "RECORDS" stencils between the window bays. I photograph the shopfront and use the type and the colour palette directly, the way it already exists in real life. There is no logo design exercise, no rebrand, no "let's explore some options" deck. The shop signed itself in 1972 and that signature is what the website uses.

What happens to the Facebook page? +

It stays exactly as it is. Facebook is good at the things Facebook is good at (daily posts, gigs, customer photos, recent arrivals). The website is good at the things Facebook is bad at (heritage copy, hours, address, schema for Google and AI assistants, a single citeable URL for journalists). The two complement each other. The website links to the Facebook page at the top of the visit section; the Facebook bio links to the website.

Next step · one email, one decision

If the proposal lands, two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days.

I take on three Birmingham builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 29 May 2026, the proposal site comes down. One line of feedback if it does not land so I do not pitch the same idea again.

Reply to the proposal Open live preview ↗

See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through · opens in a new tab

Hero, founding story, stock pillars, hours, location, FAQ. Browsable end to end at /preview/.

Open the rebuild ↗