NEMS, 12-14 Whitechapel: Site of Brian Epstein's Record Shop

NEMS, the North End Music Stores branch that Brian Epstein ran at 12-14 Whitechapel in central Liverpool, is where he said he first heard of the Beatles, in October 1961. He became their manager and ran the business from the offices upstairs. The building has been demolished and nothing marks the site. A statue of Epstein stands nearby.

The store Epstein ran

The Epstein family's North End Music Stores opened a purpose-built, four-storey record and music shop at 12-14 Whitechapel in 1960, and Brian Epstein was put in charge of the whole operation. The Whitechapel shop made a point of stocking every release. It also sold Mersey Beat, the local music paper edited by Bill Harry, which put the Beatles on the front page of its second issue.

The request for My Bonnie

Epstein opened his 1964 memoir, A Cellarful of Noise, with the story. At about three o'clock on Saturday 28 October 1961 an 18-year-old called Raymond Jones came to the counter and asked for My Bonnie, a single made in Germany by a group called the Beatles. Epstein did not have it and made a note to look into it. On 9 November he went down to the Cavern Club to see the band for himself.

The story is less tidy than he told it. Epstein's assistant Alistair Taylor later said that he had put the order through under Jones's name, a regular customer, and paid the deposit himself. And since NEMS was already selling Mersey Beat with the Beatles on the cover, some writers doubt that the name was new to Epstein.

The offices upstairs

Epstein ran his management company from rooms above the shop. The Beatles signed their management contract with him there in 1962, and it was in the Whitechapel office on 16 August 1962 that he told Pete Best he was out of the band.

What stands at 12-14 Whitechapel now

NEMS kept trading on Whitechapel into the 1990s. The shop then went through several tenants, including the electrical retailer Rumbelows and an Ann Summers store. The NEMS building was later demolished and the site rebuilt as part of a retail development later occupied by Forever 21. None of the original shop survives.

There is no Beatles or NEMS marker on the site today. A Harp Beat plaque was unveiled by Gerry Marsden in 1991, while Rumbelows had the shop, but by around 2010 nobody could say where it had gone.

The nearest tribute is the bronze statue of Brian Epstein by Andy Edwards and Jane Robbins, unveiled in August 2022 at the corner of Button Street and Whitechapel. It shows him striding towards the Cavern with a contract in hand. From there it is a short walk to the Cavern Club and the John Lennon statue on Mathew Street.