shut up shop

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1. (intransitive, Britain, colloquial) To close up shop; to end a business activity.

   The company decided to shut up shop in this country and move to America, where corporate taxes are lower.

   • 2019 April 29, Philip Oltermann, “Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?”, in The Guardian‎, retrieved 2021-07-26:

     Instead of shutting up shop, Ghouneim relocated to humdrum Wittenau, a suburb of Berlin, and got some tape artists to decorate the facade of the new building.

   • 2020 July 1, Daniel Puddicombe, “How can heritage lines recover from enforced closures?”, in Rail, page 30:

     But like almost every other business sector, the Coronavirus outbreak in March has forced every single heritage railway to shut up shop for several months... at a time when they would normally be at their busiest.

   • 2023, Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, page 128:

     After months of bitter disagreements and legal back-and-forth, he had finally given up and struck out on his own, but he'd met with a string of bad luck—a client who refused to pay, a flood, a false insurance claim—and he'd had to shut up shop; now he was working for a big construction firm as a gun for hire and telling anybody who would listen what a rotten hand he had been dealt.

2. (intransitive, cricket) To bat defensively in the last innings of a match in order to force a draw when winning is not possible.

• “shut up shop”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.