Alnwick
Book heaven
A short trip to Northumberland last week gave me a golden opportunity to visit one of the largest secondhand bookshops in the country: Barter Books at Alnwick – once famously described at a ‘national institution’.
Housed in the listed former Victorian station building. it’s home to over 350,000 used books, all methodically catalogued and displayed. Famous quotes garland the stacks; tantalising glimpses of still more treasures invite you ever deeper.
And more than that, the huge space includes wonderfully conducive oases of calm and comfort for the book-hungry visitor, with plush seating, a real fire, the old water fountain fostering an olde worlde ambience.
It even boasts a model railway running overhead in one area, preserving the sense of trains coming and going.
It’s the kind of place where you sink into a much-used baggy chair and sigh with relief that books – real hardcopy books, are very much alive and well. And by all means read before you buy, madam. Coffee, sir? Jersey milk ice-cream, anyone? Mmmmmmmm … I may be gone some time.
