ONE of Malvern’s independent shops had just celebrated its 30th birthday.

Aquarius opened its doors on the Priory Steps, just off Abbey Road, on Valentine’s Day in 1989.

Since then it has built up a loyal clientele for its stock of spiritual books, crystals and other New Age merchandise.

But it has not all been plain sailing, recalls Valerie de Heer, who still runs the shop with her husband Brian after they founded it three decades ago.

She said: “I think that when we started, we were only one of three such shops in the country - the others were Arcania in Bath and Arcturus in Totnes.

"They both began with an A as well, and we decided to name our shop after the Aquarian age, which has taken over from the Piscean age, the age of the fish.”

Like many other traders in the area and further afield, Mr and Mrs de Heer found that the foot-and-mouth epidemic 20 years ago caused them a great deal of trouble.

“The Malvern Hills were closed and that really hit us because people just stopped coming to Malvern, and it took us quite some time to recover from that.”

She said that the longevity of the business has had a lot to do with the loyalty of the shop’s customers.

She added: “There are some very long-standing independent shops in Malvern, like Gordon Smiths and of course Brays, so people obviously like supporting local businesses and, in our case, we do have a lot of faithful customers who come back again and again.

“Malvern has a lot of healers, a lot of creative people and, of course, a lot of musicians, so the town really has a special atmosphere and it is a joy to be here.

“The books that we sell are what I would call spiritual but not religious, and when we started out, these sort of things were considered a bit marginal, but aspects of this type of thinking are more or less mainstream these days.

“All sorts of people are interested in these sorts of questions, including a lot of scientists, and that interest is not going to go away.”

Mrs de Heer said despite the continuing encroachment of the internet into retailing, the shop has retained its own special attraction for visitors.

She said: “People tell us that they like to come to the shop because it has a very calming, relaxing atmosphere and that's good with all the stresses that people have to live with these days.”