THE owner of one of the last video rental shops in North Yorkshire is to close it down next month.

Steve Arundale, 64, who runs the Norton Video Centre in Commercial Street, said it will be “the end of an era”.

He will continue to rent out new releases up to April as normal, and then will begin to sell the stock.

Mr Arundale has been trading for just a few months short of 30 years, starting off in a shop next to the chip shop in Wood Street.

“I started off there for ten years,” he said. “Then these premises came up 20 years ago. We sort of rebuilt them up, then opened as a video shop.”

Initially he was renting out VHS tapes. “We opened up just on the changeover from Betamax to VHS, and then over time it’s changed from tapes to DVDs and now Blu-rays,” he said.

With the arrival of streaming services, he says the business is no longer viable, and now plans to enjoy his retirement.