The Works (retailer)
UK-based retailer
TheWorks.co.uk PLC, trading as The Works, is a discount retailer based in the United Kingdom selling books, art and craft materials, gifts, toys, games and stationery. It has more than 500 stores across the UK and Ireland as of September 2026.
Stores
The Works stores are categorised into five product "zones": Kids (toys, games etc.), Arts and Craft, Stationery, Family Gifts, and Seasonal/Regional, which includes a selection of local interest and tourist-specific ranges. TheWorks.co.uk, the company's first e-commerce platform, was launched in January 2012.
The company's loyalty card scheme, 'Together', was launched in 2013, and had reached one million members by the end of 2016. The scheme closed down in March 2024.
History
Establishment
The Works has its origins when husband and wife Mike and Jane Crossley started selling remaindered books from their front room in 1981. The company was founded in 1981 as discount bookstore Remainders Limited. The Crossleys had both worked for British Leyland in Oxford whilst Mike Crossley's brother had been winding down a business in the West Midlands.
Growth
By 1984 the Crossleys had opened their first shop in Halesowen though this no longer features as a branch in the company's chain of stores.
“The Works (retailer)” enters the record as uK-based retailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Works, retailer and UK-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7775853. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2012, 2013 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Works (retailer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.