NEWS that high street store C&A is closing all its UK branches came as a shock to many shoppers. Sure, fashion conscious customers hadn't set foot in C&A for years. After all, this was the retailer best known for its acrylic knitwear, no-nonsense slacks and low prices - as opposed to high style.

But C&A was a high street stalwart. Its stores, with that brightly coloured logo on the door handles, had been with us for 75 years.

And though we might have thought the chain was a fashion disaster, we still expected it to be with us forever.

The disorientation of shoppers was compounded because it had also just been announced that two other familiar faces - Principles For Men and Richards - are also to disappear from our city centres.

But Professor Steve Burt, director of the Institute For Retail Studies at Stirling University, points out these sudden losses are nothing new.

He says: "There has always been a lot of change. Okay, C&A is a biggy and everyone goes 'ooh!' but if you look at any high street over time you will see comings and goings.''

Older shoppers may well remember the days when John Colliers was a leading name in men's clothing. Its catchphrase proudly proclaimed that theirs was "the window to watch" - until it vanished.

Retail analyst Clive Vaughan recalls: "John Colliers disappeared some time in the 80s, when it was taken over. It had been around for a very long time, probably half a century. It was a very well established name in menswear."

Similarly, he says, there was Dunns menswear: "That had been around for donkey's years, probably about 100 years or so. It disappeared around 1993."

Then there was Timothy Whites, the chemist and hardware store. He says this long-gone face was bought by Boots in the 1970s.

And Fine Fare, once a seemingly unassailable supermarket giant, was with us for at least four decades before being taken over in the mid 1980s. It was eventually absorbed into what became Somerfield.

While many big names were simply taken over, some went bust in spectacular fashion - including furniture retailer Lowndes Queensway, which collapsed in 1990.

In other cases, companies decided to give their images a radical overhaul. Thus Hepworth metamorphosed into Next and Chelsea Girl and Concept Man became River Island.

In retail land, it seems that nothing is forever. The pace of change quickened in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was an increase in takeover activity and the likes of Harrods, Sears and Debenhams were putting their empires together.

Today, fierce competition on the high street means that C&A will probably not be the last big name to go.

We took a walk down memory lane to revisit some of the stores that seemed in-with-the-bricks at one time but are with us no more.

MAPLES

IN the 1990s, the UK lost a number of furniture stores and one of the biggest was Maples. The chain had been trading for more than 150 years when it went into receivership in 1997.

Clive Vaughan says: "Maples made its name decking out Balmoral and Sandringham for Queen Victoria. It had really been around for a long, long time."

When Maples failed there was fury from some customers who had put down deposits for goods. It was reported at the time that nearly £2m had been taken in down-payments from customers in the three days before the collapse. The furore was a sad end to a long-loved name.

DILLONS

Dillons was a huge name in the bookselling world. In 1990, its store in Gower Street was the only bookshop in Western Europe where Boris Yeltsin signed copies of his new work.

It was founded in 1936, when Una Dillon spotted a bookshop in London's Tottenham Court Road that looked as if it was about to go bankrupt and bought it with an £800 loan. She sold Dillons to London University in 1956 and it then passed through a variety of hands before being merged with Waterstones and HMV record stores in 1998.

Now the historic name has vanished from our streets as its stores were rebranded as Waterstones.

CHELSEA GIRL

IN the swinging 1960s, when everything was hip and happening, Chelsea Girl fashion stores were hugely popular.

But when Leonard Lewis took control of the business from his father Bernard in 1988, he realised the name was becoming dated and reinvented the store as River Island. Concept Man was also brought under the new banner.

Clive Vaughan says: "When Chelsea Girl became River Island, the change happened gradually during the late 1980s and into the 1990s. It was a phased programme and the shops co-existed for a short while."

The transformation from tired to born again trendy was seen by industry analysts as a huge success.

HEPWORTH

Remember Hepworth, the menswear retailer that was renowned for being rather dowdy? And do you recall Kendalls, the chain of similarly dull women's wear shops?

Well, when Hepworth bought Kendalls it was decided that an image boost was in order - cue a rebranding and the birth of high street giant Next.

Difficult as it is to believe, Next has only been with us since the early 1980s. In that decade the apparently new shop became the supplier of red or gold-buttoned suits to the Yuppie generation. The transformation had worked a treat.

Professor Burt says: "If you knew the sector, you knew that Next was Hepworth - but most customers would only know that a new shop had opened called Next."