Hidden in the middle of Gloucestershire’s photogenic Five Valleys, Stroud is not the sort of place that you’d discover by passing through. You have to be deliberately intending to visit it, because it’s not on the way to anywhere. But increasingly, that is exactly what record collectors are doing because, for a small market town, it punches above its weight for music: alongside two annual music festivals, numerous venues and a wealth of thrift and house clearance stores selling used vinyl, it has three dedicated record shops.
Trading Post is the jewel in Stroud’s musical crown: “It’s got respect from all over the country and from other record shops as well, because it’s been going for so long. It’s the longest running in Gloucestershire and probably in the top 10 or 15 in the country,” says its owner of the last 19 years Simon Vincent. The story of how he came to run the shop reads like a fairy tale.
The shop was originally started back in 1977 by former Chrysalis Records employee Jo Walters as a place to offload her unwanted accumulated freebies. But she also surfed the musical wave that was happening at the time: “In those days, not many shops in Gloucestershire would stock punk and post punk apart from Jo,” says Vincent, “so the Gloucester punks would come over to this tiny shop. It took off and became much more than a second-hand venture to sell off her collection”