On the particular alignment between grey weather and good bookselling — the London version
The London bookshop operates on the understanding that the city's weather and the condition of wanting to be indoors with a book are the same thing.
The London bookshop operates on the understanding that the city's weather and the condition of wanting to be indoors with a book are the same thing — not metaphorically aligned but practically identical. Rain in London is not a weather event. It is a persistent ambient condition, and the bookshops that have lasted longest have organised themselves around it: deep interiors, secondary rooms, the kind of layout that requires you to pass through one section to reach another and that benefits from an hour rather than fifteen minutes.
Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street contains the room. The galleried long room at the back — Edwardian oak, skylights, a balcony reached by a small staircase — is the specific version of the thing that everyone who makes lists of beautiful bookshops is trying to describe. It is also, simply, a very good bookshop: the travel section at the back organises books by country rather than by author or subject, which is the correct system for the kind of browser who knows approximately where they are going but not exactly what they want to read about when they get there.
Charing Cross Road is the other answer — not one bookshop but a street, or rather the memory of a street, that has been thinned by rent and changed by time but has not been entirely replaced. Foyles now occupies the former Borders building (one of those strange bibliographic reversals) and has organised five floors of books in a way that rewards the kind of Saturday morning visit that does not have a specific purchase in mind. The Cecil Court passage off Charing Cross Road is the remaining concentration of specialist and antiquarian dealers — maps, theatre ephemera, first editions — that keeps the original argument of the street alive.
The third location, which fewer visitors know, is the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place in Bloomsbury. The shop is attached to the London Review of Books — the newspaper of literary record — and carries the kind of stock that such an attachment should imply: the recent, the serious, the international, and the backlist titles that the shop has decided are still worth reading. The café at the back operates on the correct principle that a bookshop café should be quieter than a coffee shop.