On the particular density of a neighbourhood organised, at some level, around the act of reading
The bookshop is a form of architecture — not in the metaphorical sense, but literally: a structure that organises space around a specific human activity, and whose success depends on getting that organisation right.
The bookshop is a form of architecture — not in the metaphorical sense, but literally: a structure that organises space around a specific human activity, and whose success depends on getting that organisation right. The shelves are load-bearing not structurally but experientially. Remove them and you have a room. Arrange them correctly and you have a place.
Bloomsbury has more bookshops per street than anywhere else in London, which is an observation made so regularly that it has stopped being an observation and become a given. What is less observed is why — and the answer is mostly institutional. The British Museum, the University of London, the Slade, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Warburg Institute: a concentration of institutions that run on books and that have been here long enough to generate, around themselves, the shops that serve them.
Museum Street has changed in composition since I first walked it fifteen years ago. Some of the dealers in rare books and antique prints have moved or closed. Others have arrived. What persists is the particular quality of a street that functions as a threshold — between the museum and the neighbourhood, between the institutional and the private, between the book as cultural object and the book as thing you carry home.
The best bookshops in Bloomsbury are not the ones that announce themselves. They are the ones that require a specific intention to visit. Persephone Books, on Lamb's Conduit Street, publishes and sells its own titles exclusively — grey-spined editions of neglected 20th-century fiction, almost all by women, each with a period endpaper. The shop is the size of a large sitting room. It is impossible to enter without spending longer than you planned.
On a grey London morning — which is, proportionally, most of them — Bloomsbury operates as a particular kind of invitation. The streets are wide enough for the light to enter even when there is no sun. The buildings are predominantly Georgian, which means they are four storeys of honest material and proportional windows. And the bookshops are open, most of them, by nine in the morning. Which is when they should be.