Philip Hensher: If you want small shops to survive, buy from them

We all pay lip service to the ideal of diversity, of course. When it comes to the simplest ways of supporting a diverse and varied community, however, it all too often seems as if we can't be bothered. Look at an average city or town high street in England; the odds are that there are only a handful of shops which aren't replicated in every other high street in the country. We bemoan this, but it doesn't seem to occur to us that it is entirely within our power to do something about it.

I heard about a particularly painful instance of failed diversity recently. The well-known, and even rather historic, gay bookshop, Gay's the Word, is in danger of closing down. The usual story: rising rents in central London, a static and ageing customer profile and, as in the case of many pioneering, radical endeavours from the Seventies, the sense that its purpose has been served.

For gay people of my generation, a visit to the Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury was a metropolitan rite of passage. Twenty-five years ago, it seemed genuinely rather inspiring that, unlike every other gay business in town, it proclaimed itself without embarrassment, and had windows that you could look into and out of. This was at a time when every gay bar had blacked-out windows and a neutral-sounding name.

Having survived at least one ludicrous police raid, in which the rozzers carried off copies of works by Tennessee Williams, it looks, however, as if it might now succumb to the onward march of the average high street. Its amiable manager, Jim MacSweeney, says it is getting harder to carry on in the face of rising rents and dwindling interest. I went in the other day to show support by spending a hundred pounds there - I discovered Forrest Reid's interesting 1940s trilogy, among other out-of-the-way finds. I recommend everyone who can to do the same thing.

The positive spin to put on the closure of these specialist businesses, I suppose, is that the battle has been won. In this case, you could say that literature on gay themes is published routinely by mainstream publishers, and sold by mainstream bookshops. There is, too, the internet, catering for almost any interest, however abstruse.

The same story could be told in almost any retail business. Mass-market supermarkets introduce luxury ranges to compete with specialist retailers; the customer abandons that useful little fishmonger, which closes down, and shortly all you have is a choice between supermarkets. A specialist record shop can't compete on price with a massive retailer; but the chain store can't offer the expertise or the range, and doesn't want to.

The answer is straightforward. If you want specialist food shops to survive, buy your cheese from a cheese shop and your meat from a butcher rather than from Tesco. If you want small bookshops to survive, then buy your books from an independent. You get better advice from John Sandoe in Chelsea, or Daunt Books, and if they don't have a book in stock, they will always order one in, usually by the next day.

We hear a lot about a particular sort of customer of record shops and bookshops, the "Fifty-quid man" - the customer who goes in and drops £50, more or less on a whim, on a couple of DVDs and a hardback novel. Those whims don't mean a lot to a national chain, but 100 or so people regularly spending that sum of money in a small bookshop or record shop can mean the difference between success and failure.

We're not going to achieve diversity by expressing pious regrets. In general, when a specialist shop fails, the expertise it represents is easily lost, and replaced by the sort of business cheap to set up and cheap to run. If Gay's the Word went under, for instance, it would be replaced, probably, by the thousandth branch of wretched Starbuck's.

In this particular case, the service a store performs for the particular community ought to be clear. If we want a bookshop in London that doesn't sell porn or amyl nitrate, then we ought to use it. If we don't, all the gay community is going to amount to is hundreds of bars and nightclubs, and that is not what diversity really means. I have nothing against bars and nightclubs, but they have one major drawback; you are never going to be able to buy the novels of Forrest Reid there.

At the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's great novel, The Bookshop, its heroine closes her brave little enterprise and leaves the Fenland town, hanging her head in shame because the town "had not wanted a bookshop".

It's a haunting line. There is something ultimately a little bit shameful about a town, or a community, that has and wants no bookshop. A street of shops is better for the presence of a bookshop of any sort.

Probably nobody will notice when there isn't a gay bookshop in London any more. Probably nobody really noticed when the fishmonger, or the butcher, or the greengrocer closed down - they were all once stalwarts of every high street in England, but there's no money in it any more. But when these small, interesting and vital businesses disappear and you have to buy absolutely everything in a vast shed owned by Tesco, life has just become a little bit worse. Once something like that has gone, you won't get it back, and all that will be left in your high street is a wilderness of coffee shops and estate agents.