On Saturday afternoon, surfing legend Mark Richards will shut the doors on the family shop at 755 Hunter Street - a surfing institution that has been selling boards since 1958.

In an industry when retailers come and go - in a street where too many businesses, sadly, have simply gone - 54 years of selling surfboards from the one address must be some sort of record.

See pictures of Mark Richards through the years by clicking on the image below.

For the four-time professional world surfing champion who turns 55 in March, shutting the shop is not "doom and gloom".

The man known simply as MR acknowledges retailing's decline along the once vibrant Hunter Street but says the time has come to move on with his life.

"I haven't made it a secret but the word has got around," he said. "We've had people in just wanting to wander round and soak up the atmosphere one last time."

His good friend and the shop's other main face, fellow Merewether surfer Mick Adam, can hardly believe it's happening.

"I started here in the 1970s when I was still at school," Adam said. "I'm going to miss it."

It's the stuff of surfing legend that Mark's father, the late Ray Richards, started the shop as a second-hand car showroom in the post-war 1950s.

Records that Mark's wife Jenny found this week showed the first board Ray bought came from Barry Bennett's at Brookvale, in 1958, at a cost of ?26.

Surfboards remained sidelines for a few years but in the early 1960s, Ray and wife Val took a history-making plunge and gave the shop over to surfing.

As David Knox wrote in his 1992 biography, Mark Richards, A Surfing Legend: "For a surf-struck youngster, that shop was a wondrous place. " It was also home to the young Richards, who lived as an only child with his parents in a flat above the showroom.