Geoff Travis's Notting Hill record shop, opened in 1976, that grew into a label and a distribution network and became the organising centre of British DIY and post-punk · the shop where the independent infrastructure the genre travelled along was built.
Rough Trade is the record shop that became an institution, and the Bureau opens the Record Shops section with it because it is the clearest case in the dossier of a shop counter generating an entire infrastructure. Geoff Travis, a former drama teacher, opened it on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill on 23 February 1976, taking the name from a Canadian art-punk band and the model from the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco: a place where customers were meant to linger, argue and discover as much as to buy.
The shop arrived weeks before punk broke, and it became the form's London clearing-house almost immediately. The wall of seven-inch singles functioned as a noticeboard for the emerging DIY culture; members of The Raincoats and Swell Maps worked the counter; and within two years Travis had turned the shop into a label (1978) and an embryonic distribution company. That distribution arm, later folded into The Cartel network, is the reason Rough Trade matters to this archive beyond its own roster: it is the spine the British post-punk and industrial undergrounds travelled along, the system that got records from the bedroom labels to the shops.
The label's own catalogue (The Fall, This Heat, Young Marble Giants, later The Smiths) sits adjacent to the industrial form rather than inside it, and the Bureau does not file Rough Trade for its releases. It files the shop, the physical and organisational point from which independent retail and distribution in Britain were reorganised. Industrial Records, the cassette undergrounds and the noise labels all depended on a distribution culture that Rough Trade did more than any other single business to build.
Travis sold the shop to employees Nigel House, Jude Crighton and Pete Donne in 1982, when the label and distribution had outgrown it, and the Rough Trade shop chain continues today in the UK, US and Germany. The original Notting Hill counter is the source point: the place where, more than at any label office, the British independent sector was first organised as a culture and a supply chain. The Bureau files it at RS·001 as the founding entry in the Record Shops section, the shop that proved a record shop could be infrastructure.