W H Smith

W H Smith was a British retailer where Susan Foreman looked for ballpoint pens in 1963. Though the shop did indeed sell them, she wasn't allowed to use them at Coal Hill School, where fountain pens were required. (PROSE: Time and Relative)

Luke Tillyard once bought some magazines from the shop. (PROSE: Salva Mea) Christine Summerfield recalled that W H Smith sold adult fantasy magazines. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

In 1994, Ben Jackson and Polly Wright visited W H Smith. Polly looked at The Times. Later Ben and Polly both read the biography River Phoenix: A Short Life by Brian J. Robb. (PROSE: Invasion of the Cat-People)

In 1996, the Fourth Doctor searched a W H Smith for a Christmas card. (PROSE: The Little Things)

Ace reflected that the books in Gilles Lemaitre's collection were the sort one certainly didn't find in the local W H Smiths. (PROSE: White Darkness)

When the Tenth Doctor returned Donna Noble to Earth after she was drawn to huon particles in the heart of the TARDIS on 24 December 2007, Donna tried to phone her mother Sylvia Noble at a pay phone by a W H Smith. She attempted to use the shop as a point of reference to explain where she was. (TV: The Runaway Bride)

In 2008, Suki was supposed to meet Kelsey Hooper and Maria Jackson at W H Smith after their tour of the Bubble Shock! factory. This meeting never ended up taking place when Kelsey was caught by the Bane. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)

Behind the scenes
In the real world, W H Smith is a major British bookseller which has long sold Doctor Who books, magazines and videos. Their sales are so significant that they have been able to affect distribution of Doctor Who merchandise in a couple of ways.

They have occasionally been able to issue "retailer exclusives", or particular packages available only at their stores. They sold at least three limited edition box sets of Doctor Who episodes for BBC Video — The Davros Collection in 2001, The Time Lord Collection in 2002, and The Dalek Collection in 2005.

They also had enough clout with BBC Books to influence book jacket design. In 1994 W H Smith refused to stock the novel Goth Opera based on its planned cover illustration, which portrayed Nyssa as a vampire with a great deal of blood on her clothes. Since W H Smith were the UK's largest book retailer, Virgin Books chose to address their concerns and airbrush most of the blood out of the cover image before publication.