Dub Vendor is a long-standing, and pioneering, London vendor of Ska and Reggae music that now is mainly a London-based mail order

Mail order

Mail order is a term which describes the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote method such as through a telephone call or web site. Then, the products are delivered to the customer...

 company specialising in Jamaican music. In 2006, TimeOut magazine termed it "the best source of Jamaican music in Europe" A visit to Dub Vendor is online at the Internet Archive.

History

Founded by John MacGillivray in 1976, Dub Vendor began life as a market stall in London's Clapham Junction in response to the considerable lack of West Indian music at the time. Clapham Junction at that time was a poor inner suburb, and the surging population of immigrants from the West Indies made Clapham and nearby Brixton their new homes. The stall, and the shop that followed, were instant successes, and the second Dub Vendor store (or 'record shack' as it's known) opened four years later in Ladbroke Grove

Ladbroke Grove

Ladbroke Grove is a road in west London, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is also sometimes the name given informally to the immediate area surrounding the road. Running from Notting Hill in the south to Kensal Green in the north, it is located in North Kensington and straddles...

 right next to the Underground

London Underground

The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...

 station.

In response to London's reggae

Reggae

Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...

 scene flourishing in the early '80s, larger premises were required to cater for the increasing demand for reggae, ska

Ska

Ska |Jamaican]] ) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s, and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues...

, and allied genres. Subsequently, 274 Lavender Hill became Dub Vendor's flagship store and also the home of its home-brew recording studio label, Fashion Records

Fashion Records

Fashion Records is a UK-based record label publishing reggae music.Founded in summer 1980, Fashion Records is one of the more successful UK-based reggae labels , and one of only a very few British reggae labels to release records that were produced in their own recording studio.The label was the...

.

The Ladbroke Grove shack continued to operate alongside the Lavender Hill store until 1991, when it was moved down the road to 150 Ladbroke Grove, due to the lack of space in the shack to accommodate the ever-increasing patronage of reggae lovers.

The future for the Ladbroke Grove branch began to look bleak, however, as sales fell and the rent increased. The final nail in the coffin came in 2007 in the form of the Western Extension, which resulted in the store closing its doors to the public just over a year later on the 28th June 2008.