When it comes to literary cities, they don’t come much bigger than London – just think how many novels have been set here and writers who have worked here – so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the capital is bursting with bookshops. Yes the big chains are all here but there are a ton of fantastic independent bookshops that are well worth exploring.
There are specialist shops like The Second Shelf, stocked with rare and antiquarian books, modern first editions, manuscripts and rediscovered works by women; Gay’s The Word, which is the oldest independent LGBT+ bookshop in the UK; and Round Table Books, a Black-owned bookshop in Brixton that specialises in children’s literature with diverse characters (in terms of race, gender and disability) and inclusive stories.
And then there are bookshops that just like to do things a bit differently, like Liberia by Second Home, which arranging the shelves by broad themes like ‘Wanderlust’, ‘Utopia’ and ‘The City’, rather than by category to encourage discovery, and Word On The Water, which is a floating bookshop moored on the canal.