Magma is gone and I'm still not over it. If you never went, I'm not sure I can explain what it was in a way that does it justice. A bookshop, technically. Two locations - Farringdon and Covent Garden. But calling Magma a bookshop is like calling a gallery a room with walls. It was the single best physical expression of taste I've ever encountered. Design books, indie magazines, zines, monographs, obscure publications from studios you had never heard of in cities you had never visited. Everything in that shop had been chosen. Not ordered from a catalogue. Not algorithmically suggested. Chosen by someone who understood what belonged together and what didn't.
I used to go on lunch breaks when I worked nearby. I never went looking for something specific. That was the point. You went to Magma to discover things you didn't know existed. You picked up a magazine about Japanese typography or a photobook about Soviet bus stops or a zine about brutalist architecture in South London, and every single thing in your hands felt like it had been placed there on purpose. The curation was the product. The selection was the experience. The taste of whoever was buying for that shop was so precise, so confident, so unapologetic that walking in felt like entering someone's mind.
And now it is a memory. Another one. Another place that shaped people closing because the economics didn't work. Because rent goes up and foot traffic goes down and people browse in person and buy online and the margins on a ten pound zine don't cover the cost of a Farringdon lease.
The economics of taste
Here's the tension that runs through everything I think about, everything I build, everything I care about. Taste and commerce don't naturally align. The things with the most integrity - the most considered, the most carefully curated, the most uncompromising in their vision - are usually the hardest to make money from. Because taste, by definition, is selective. And selectivity, by definition, limits your market. The shop that stocks everything outsells the shop that stocks only the right things. The platform that serves everyone outgrows the platform that serves people with discernment. The algorithm that maximises engagement beats the curator who maximises quality.
Magma was selective. Unapologetically, brilliantly selective. And that selectivity is what made it extraordinary and what made it economically fragile. You can't have it both ways. You can't be the shop where everything is perfect and also be the shop that covers its costs. Not in a city where rent is set by the market and the market doesn't care about your taste.
This keeps me up at night. Not about Magma specifically - about the principle. Because I'm trying to build things that have taste, that are curated, that care about quality over quantity. And I know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the economics are always going to push against that. The algorithm will always reward more. The market will always reward broader. The world will always find a way to punish selectivity, even while praising it.
What Magma taught me
I grew up on print magazines. The Face, i-D, Dazed and Confused - whatever I could get my hands on growing up in Nottingham, which wasn't always easy. Those magazines were my window into a world of design and culture and aesthetic thinking that I didn't have access to otherwise. And Magma was the place where that world existed physically. Where you could hold it. Where you could discover the next layer - the magazines behind the magazines, the references behind the references, the taste behind the taste.
What Magma taught me, before I had the language for it, was that curation is a creative act. The person choosing what to stock in that shop was doing something as creative as the designers making the books. They were saying: these things belong together. These things tell a story. This Japanese design annual, next to this Norwegian architecture quarterly, next to this East London zine about street signage - they're connected, and if you spend time with all three you'll see something that none of them shows you alone.
That's what I'm trying to do with every project. CultureTerminal isn't an RSS reader - it's a curated view of what matters in culture right now. Modern Retro isn't a collection of AI images - it's a curated argument about the relationship between heritage and modernity. Taste OS isn't a scoring tool - it's a curated framework for understanding why some things resonate and others don't. The curation is the product in every case. Just like it was at Magma.
The places that shape us
There's a category of places that I think of as taste infrastructure. They don't make the culture themselves - they surface it, contextualise it, connect it. Record shops that introduced you to music you would never have found on your own. Bookshops where the staff recommendations changed what you read. Cinemas with programming so sharp that you trusted them with two hours of your life on a film you knew nothing about. Galleries where the curation was so consistent that you went to see what they had chosen rather than what any individual artist had made.
Magma was taste infrastructure. And taste infrastructure is disappearing everywhere. The record shops are mostly gone. The independent bookshops are retreating to the edges. The video rental shops - which were taste engines for an entire generation - are extinct. Each one that closes takes something with it that can't be replicated online. Not the products. You can buy the same books on Amazon. What you can't replicate is the experience of browsing in a space where everything has been chosen with intention. Where the physical proximity of objects creates meaning. Where serendipity is designed.
I've been thinking about this in the context of what I build. Can you create taste infrastructure online? Can a website or an app do what Magma did - not just give you access to good things, but make you feel like you've entered a space where someone with exceptional taste has arranged the world for you? I think you can. I think that's what the best digital products do. But it requires the same uncompromising selectivity that made Magma beautiful and economically doomed.
The tension I can't resolve
If I'm honest, this is the question at the centre of everything I do. Can taste pay the rent? Can the things I build - the curated ones, the selective ones, the ones where I say no to more things than I say yes to - can they sustain themselves? Or is taste always going to be subsidised by something else? By a day job, by advertising, by some other revenue stream that compromises the purity of the thing?
Magma tried. For over twenty years, Magma tried. And eventually the economics won. The rent was too high. The margins were too thin. The audience, however devoted, however passionate, wasn't large enough to keep the lights on. And that's the story of taste in a commercial world. Not that taste isn't valued. People loved Magma. People mourned Magma. But they didn't buy enough eight pound zines on a Tuesday afternoon to cover a Farringdon lease.
I don't have an answer. I have a hope, which is different. The hope is that digital changes the equation. That the cost of running a website isn't the cost of running a Farringdon shopfront. That a curated digital experience can reach people that a physical shop never could. That taste can find its audience at scale without losing the thing that makes it taste - the selectivity, the point of view, the willingness to exclude.
Modern Retro works because it's a curated argument, not a content mill. Taste OS works because it has a point of view about what quality means, not a feature list. If these things can sustain themselves - not as businesses necessarily, but as proof that taste-led building has an audience - then maybe the answer to Magma's question isn't no. Maybe it isn't yet.
But I keep thinking about that shop. The smell of new paper. The weight of a design monograph in your hands. The feeling of discovering something you didn't know existed, placed there by someone who knew you would find it. No algorithm can do that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And the fact that the place which could do it - which did it better than anywhere else - couldn't survive is something I think about every time I sit down to build.
If I ever open a physical space - a bookshop-cafe, hot chocolate instead of coffee, good music, curated shelves - it'll be because of Magma. Because some debts aren't financial. They're aesthetic. And this one isn't settled.
