Lowri Griffiths investigates whether the thing she wants to be true is actually true

Reporting from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

I have a financial relationship with approximately six North London independent bookshops that I would describe as intimate and that my bank would describe as a recurring expenditure category that appears in my statement more often than my broadband payment. The relationship is not rational by any financial metric I can apply: the books available at the independent bookshops are almost always also available at Amazon for less, they are available at the Waterstones on the high street for approximately the same price, and the independent bookshops themselves are open during hours that require me to either go at the weekend when they are crowded or on a weekday afternoon when I should be working.

I go anyway. I go specifically. I go with intention. I go because the independent bookshop is the institution that I most want to continue existing in North London, and that I have concluded will continue existing partly in proportion to how often I give it money, and that gives me something that no other form of book purchasing provides: the specific experience of being in a room where the books have been chosen by a person with an opinion about books, and where the person with an opinion is often present and willing to share it, and where the opinion has a better track record of producing books I want to read than the algorithm whose track record is producing books that other people who bought the books I bought also bought, which is not the same thing.

The State of the Independent Bookshop

The Booksellers Association and the Londonist annual data shows that independent bookshop numbers in the UK have stabilised after years of decline, with a net increase in the past three years attributable to new openings offsetting a lower rate of closures. North London specifically has seen four new independent bookshop openings since 2021, all in areas where rents are high enough that the opening is either an act of commercial courage, a subsidy from an investor who loves books, or the product of a very specific lease negotiation that most retail businesses cannot secure.

The surviving and new shops share characteristics: community programming (author events, reading groups, children’s sessions) that creates a reason to visit beyond purchasing; curated stock rather than comprehensive stock, which makes the shop navigable rather than overwhelming; and staff who are visibly interested in the books they are selling, which is the competitive advantage that Amazon cannot replicate because Amazon does not have staff who are interested in anything in particular. The model is working at the scale of individual shops in specific communities. It is not a model that produces a national bookshop chain. It is a model that produces the specific North London bookshop that I am going to on Saturday, because I went last Saturday and they told me to come back when the order arrived, and the order is arriving this week, and it is a book I could have ordered from Amazon but I ordered from them instead, because the six pounds I did not save on shipping is the price of the institution I want to continue existing, and I have decided that price is worth paying.

Every column is an argument about what a city or a neighbourhood or an institution is, made by a person who has decided that describing it carefully is worth the time. The argument is never finished. The subject keeps changing. The description must keep up, or acknowledge where it has fallen behind, or find the moment when the gap between the description and the reality is itself the story. That gap, in London in 2026, is almost always the story. The city produces it continuously. The writing tries to keep pace. It does not always succeed. It is always trying, which is the correct posture for anyone covering a city that does not wait for its coverage to catch up.

The Craft of Writing About a City

Writing about London — or any part of it, any institution within it, any person navigating it — requires a specific combination of attention and detachment that is harder to maintain than either alone. Too much attention produces sentiment that obscures observation: you see what you feel about the place rather than what is there. Too much detachment produces observation that lacks the warmth that makes it worth reading: you see what is there but you do not convey why it matters to anyone, which is the question that all writing must eventually answer.

The balance is different for every writer and every subject, and the version that works best is the one that readers recognise as honest — that they identify not as a performed relationship to a place but as the real one, with all its contradictions and affections and frustrations intact. London in 2026 is a city that contains multitudes: the financial centre and the food bank, the heritage landmark and the planning dispute, the world-class museum and the neighbourhood that cannot afford the ticket, the tourist experience and the resident experience, both genuine and genuinely different. Writing about it requires holding all of these things simultaneously without resolving them into a simpler story, which is harder than it sounds and more important than it seems, because the simplified version of London — whether promotional or critical — misses the thing that makes it worth the attention: its complexity, its density, its inexhaustible capacity to be exactly itself while changing completely.

The Guardian UK and the BBC UK News provide the baseline coverage of London and Britain that this column takes as read. The column provides what the baseline does not: the specific, the personal, the granular, the particular angle from inside the neighbourhood or the institution or the experience that the baseline looks at from outside. Both are necessary. Neither is complete without the other. The column is the inside view. The city is the subject. The city continues.

Also at https://newsthump.com.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism