Is the basement of the Bling Building on 69 Hanover Street the wrong place for a Sex Shop?

‘People have been surprised. And not massively happy’

Dear readers — Today we take a look behind the rose-covered door of the sex shop Scandals. The shop, which is next door to the Merseyside Youth Association (MYA), has ruffled feathers (or rather, one feather…).

Last Wednesday, the owners of Scandals appeared before the Licencing Committee, in order to secure a renewal of their terms to trade for another year. The Chief Executive of the MYA was there too, claiming the shop shouldn’t be permitted to trade next door to a Youth Centre. We sent Ophira Gottlieb to find out more about the complaint, and the sex shop’s defence against it.

Editor’s note: To read today’s story you’ll have to be a paying member of The Post. We’re just nine subscribers away from hitting our target this month, so why not click the button below to help us out? It costs just £7 a month and you’ll get access to our entire back catalogue of investigations, as well as an invite to our next event which is currently in the works (very exciting). Not only that, but you’ll also be helping support us in our mission to give Merseyside a high quality, clickbait-free news outlet. Isn’t that great?

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Your Post briefing

Liverpool City Council will spend nearly £2 million on a plan to eradicate smoking in the city by 2030. The new proposal, called Stopping the Start, was first drawn up in 2022 and involves creating more “smoke-free” public environments, as well as targeting young people to prevent the habit. Currently around 17% of people in Liverpool smoke and spend almost £2,500 a year on the habit, according to the council. 

A manhunt is underway after notorious Everton gangster Daniel Gee absconded from prison earlier this week. Gee, who is now 44 years old, was jailed indefinitely in 2010 after he was found guilty of conspiring to buy guns and threatening to kill a teenager. He’d been an instrumental player in the city’s drug trade before his arrest — along with his two brothers Darren and Stephen Gee — and has previously served a seven-and-a-half year sentence for drug offences. He escaped while being transferred to a Category D open prison. 

And a recommended read to round up today’s briefing. This review of Boys from the Blackstuff in The Times offers a slightly more nuanced take on James Graham’s stage adaptation. “The playwright stumbles in this co-production with Liverpool’s Royal Court,” author Clive David writes. “Yes, there are flickers of Scouse humour, accompanied by the occasional earnest sea shanty. But in the end, Graham and the director Kate Wasserberg haven’t quite solved the problem of how to squeeze a five-part saga into a single piece.” We sent author Melissa Blease to review the show last year for us — read her take on it here. 

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Is the basement of the Bling Building on 69 Hanover Street the wrong place for a Sex Shop?

By Ophira Gottlieb

I enter the Bling Building through fire doors that are overgrown with plastic vines and roses, and follow the flowers as they wind their way down a set of spot-lit stairs. At the bottom of the staircase is a second door, a buzzer, an orb-shaped security camera, and six different signs stating that no under-18s are allowed beyond that point, one of them written in five different languages. It’s all a bit ominous. I ring the buzzer, and a girl around my age comes quickly to the door.

“Can I see some ID?” she asks.

“I’m a journalist,” I reply, “I’m here to speak to Catherine.” I see she’s not entirely convinced by this. “I’m also an adult,” I add.

The sex shop Scandals first came to its home at 69 Hanover Street in November 2022. It was the third of its kind, as the owners already ran branches in Bootle and their home city of Birkenhead. The owners in question are a couple in their 30s, Catherine Kershaw and Ben Hughes, who took over the family-run business from Catherine’s parents. Catherine began working at the Birkenhead store when she was just 18 years old, and she insists that the familial aspect of the business is not awkward. “Most people are unified by sexuality,” she explains. “It might not be your whole life, but it’s a part of it. My mum’s side of the family are all bloody born-again Christians, but my nan will still sit in the back here and play sudoku.”

Once you make it past their security system, Scandals is, by sex shop standards, a relatively typical affair. Mannequins stand around wearing nothing but hospital-inappropriate nurse attire, lipstick-red whips and leather paddles dangle menacingly from a long black rack, and the shop shelves display various intriguingly-shaped objects, presumably for inserting into various orifices. On closer inspection, one of these objects is a life-size silicone garden gnome. It’s part-shop, part-curiosity museum, part-crash course in alternative sex-ed. The only thing unusual about this particular sex shop is that it’s one door down from a Youth Centre.