Church Street Books
Tim Watson opened Church Street Books on its current site in 1994 but was selling books for thirteen years before that. So he’s been whetting N16’s literary appetite for a good quarter of a century, and knows how to do it. Piles of recent
arrivals, in cardboard boxes scraping the ceiling behind his counter, lend the place a delightful, overflowing shabbiness. Specialising in contemporary fiction and children’s books (women and buggies are his weekday stalwarts), the £1 bargain boxes are also well worth a rummage. And there is much else to satisfy the over-fives. Literary and historical biography shelves host a merry bunch of figures, from Flaubert, Betjeman and Pushkin to William Cobbett, William Morris and Mussolini; the travel section is joyfully comprehensive (complete with OS maps should you find yourself inspired to go right away to that craggy bit of Yorkshire moor you’ve been reading about), while the literary studies section is packed with eccentricities from Frances Wilson’s Literary Seductions to Gilbert Adair’s Surfing the Zeitgeist. A bookshop where Jordan’s A Whole New World sits next to Marguerite van Geldermalsen’s Married to a Bedouin, on a street where a certain Edgar Allan Poe once went to school (circa 1820), is frankly the sort of place I prefer to bring my book-buying custom. And at the end of it all you can take your purchase away – like a sly liquor bottle – in a good old paper bag.
Church Street Books
142 Stoke Newington Church Street
London N16 0JU
If you have a bookshop you’d like to recommend to Pen Pusher readers, then we’d like to hear about it – submit suggestions of up to 500 words here
