A COUPLE who ran an Oxford newsagents are bidding farewell after nearly 15 years

St Giles News closed its doors for the last time yesterday after several years of struggling through a changing market place and rapidly declining footfall.

Owners Nigel and Jane Taylor say they will miss their little shop - but Mr Taylor said he was looking forward to a lie-in after getting up at ‘stupid o’clock’ for so long.

He said: “If you can’t make your job fun and enjoy it you shouldn’t do it. We managed to make it fun here – we just didn’t manage to make it profitable.

“Unfortunately we chose the wrong one.”

The grandfather, who lives with his wife in Headington, described how he and his wife came to open the shop.

He said: “We just thought we’ll have a mid-life crisis. We changed careers, we bought a sports car and we got a dog.

“Now the dog’s dead, the sports car is knackered and the shop is closing.”

Despite having to close due to rent hikes and a lack of customers, Mr Taylor said the couple will miss the shop - adding that it was the people that made it.

He said: “Oxford has so many characters and they’ve all come in here at one time or another. We’ve had beggars, kings and everyone in between and we treat everybody the same.”

Mr Taylor said several similar shops had gone the same way. Part of the problem, he said, was that younger people don’t buy newspapers and have too much of their cash tied up in student loans.