Colin Stewart Barber Shop is housed in a small, single-storey stone building about half a mile up the road from Headingley Stadium in Leeds. My grandad used to go to there to get his haircuts, as did my dad, and when I was young, I’d get taken there too. All my memories of Colin’s are framed by a fog of cigarette smoke, and revolve mostly around a stack of ancient comics, kept for the boys, next to the magazines and newspapers kept for the men. While my dad was in the barber’s chair, I’d leaf through yellowing copies of The Beano, which were full of strange, archaic strips like General Jumbo, that by the late Eighties no seven-year-old would have otherwise ever seen. I remember the uncomfortable heat of the hairdryer, the hypnotic oddness of prolonged exposure to my own reflection, and the feeling of a firm hand marshalling my lolling head. The hand would have belonged either to Colin Stewart himself, who opened the place in 1969, or to Clive Black, who started at the shop in 1978.

Colin and Clive, at 64 and 62 respectively, are still in business, both busy working on a warm Monday afternoon. They’ve never had a shortage of customers, and not just because of the biological inevitability that hair will always need cutting. Just as important is the fact that a large proportion of men will always like going to barbershops. This isn’t to say that men like having their hair cut. But these are places that tap directly into some particularities of male psychology, not least sociability, practicality, vanity and loyalty.

“A barber’s isn’t just a place where you walk in, sit in a chair and pay your money,” Clive insists in a throaty Bradford burr. “The reason we’ve been successful is that, when people come in, they almost treat it more as a club than a shop.”

James Hindle, 26, concurs. He’s popped in to have his mop of hair cropped frighteningly short, without warning his wife. “You do get to know the people who cut your hair, and you can have a laugh with them. I can’t think of any other place like that. I do a lot of climbing, and you get the same atmosphere at the climbing wall, but nowhere else in terms of actual chores you have to do.”

And a haircut, for most men, is a chore. Women may regard the experience of a trip to a salon as a treat, the procedure as important as the end result. But for us it’s a practical thing that you have actively to go out to get, like a roll of duct tape or a bottle of Lucozade, and is firmly a noun (it usually seems to be “get a haircut” rather than “have my hair cut”). So while the social side can be a sugar coating, speed, comfort and cost are equally important.

“I’ve been to Toni & Guy’s,” says Sebastian, an 18-year-old student and a new Colin customer. “But it’s a bit awkward. They wash your hair, give you a massage and bring you drinks, and it takes a lot longer. You have to feel comfortable if you’re getting a haircut, and this place fits the bill.”

“And you actually get what you want,” adds his girlfriend, from over a magazine. “It’s not… difficult, like in a girl’s hairdresser’s.”

Though everyone surveyed cites practicality, sentiment is a more subtle cause for return visits. Gervaise Sissons has been taking his son here for years. Even when “the new girl” accidentally gave 11-year-old Morgan a brutal number two instead of his usual number four (“They made me go bald! Remember, Dad?”), Gervaise “couldn’t grumble, because Colin and Clive are such great guys”.

Colin and Clive are part of a relatively small national workforce. Habia, the government-approved standards-setting body for hair, beauty, nails, barbering, spa therapy and African-Caribbean hairdressing, reported last year that there were 5,300 in the barbering trade, spread over 2,967 businesses. The hairdressing workforce, by contrast, numbered 200,000, working in 35,704 salons or unisex shops. The growth of these businesses in the Seventies and Eighties spelt ruin for thousands of men’s barbershops, claims Habia, although no figures exist for just how many went out of business then. The barbers still going now tend to be the ones that were thriving prior to the unisex boom.

One such barber is Paul Evangelista, who runs Evangelista’s, a one-man shop in Johnstone, ten miles west of Glasgow. A third-generation barber who exudes an intense satisfaction with his lot, he estimates that “99.5 per cent” of his customers will always come back to his shop. “They’re very, very loyal, and a real mix of people. I get everyone from factory workers to a Sir,” he explains.

James Robertson is a 49-year-old plumber. A quiet man, he has one of the most precise flat tops you’re likely to see. He’s been coming to Evangelista’s for 30 years and won’t go anywhere else, even if, like today, it means a 70-mile drive from his daughter’s house in Perth.

“Years ago, I told Paul I was looking for a new style, so we discussed it together and it’s been like this ever since,” he says, taking a sweet from the jar Paul keeps out. “I don’t go to other places because I’m frightened they can’t do the same job Paul does. I just come in and he’ll say, ‘The usual?’, and I say, ‘The usual.’ It makes me feel perfectly at ease, very happy.”