The London Bookshop Edit
There are a lot of “best bookshops in London” lists out there. Most of them cover the same five shops in the same order with the same photograph of Daunt Books’ reading room. They’re not wrong, exactly — but they’re also not telling you much you can actually use.
So here’s a slightly different take: not just which bookshops are worth your time, but why, and more importantly, which one is right for the kind of bookshop day you’re actually trying to have. Because there’s a difference between the shop you go to when you want to feel like you live in a Nancy Mitford novel and the one you go to when you want someone to hand-sell you something you’d never have picked up yourself.
London has both. London has all of it, frankly.
When you want the full old-London literary fantasy
Hatchards, Piccadilly and Heywood Hill, Mayfair
These two exist in a particular register — unhurried, slightly formal, the kind of shops where you lower your voice without being asked to.
Hatchards is the oldest bookshop in London, trading since 1797, and it holds five Royal Warrants which is either very impressive or very funny depending on your disposition, possibly both. The Piccadilly branch is the original; there’s also one inside St Pancras station where they do regular author signings and, in December 2024, built an entire Christmas tree out of books. I’m mentioning that because it deserves to be mentioned every time.
Heywood Hill in Mayfair is smaller, quieter, and famously the shop where Nancy Mitford worked during the war. It now runs a bespoke book subscription service where someone selects books for you based on your taste, which is either the ultimate luxury or the ultimate act of trust depending on how controlling you are about your reading list. Both, probably.
When you want the architecture as much as the books
Daunt Books, Marylebone
If you’ve seen one photograph of a London bookshop, it’s probably this one — the long Edwardian reading room, oak galleries on either side, skylights running the length of the ceiling. It looks like the kind of place that exists only in films and it is, somehow, just there on Marylebone High Street, open to anyone who walks in.
The books are organised by country of origin rather than genre, which was radical when they started doing it and remains one of the better ways to browse. I once bumped into Jonathan Pryce here. He was lovely. These things happen at Daunt Books, apparently.
There are other branches — Notting Hill, Holland Park, Cheapside — but Marylebone is the one. Worth the detour even if you’re not buying anything, though you will be buying something.
When you just want all the books
Waterstones Piccadilly and Foyles, Charing Cross Road
Sometimes you don’t want curation. You want scale. You want to spend two hours browsing across five floors and come out slightly overwhelmed and significantly poorer. These are your shops.
Waterstones Piccadilly is the largest bookshop in Europe, which is the kind of fact that only becomes real once you’re in it and realise you’ve been on the third floor for forty minutes without meaning to. Good events programme, good café at the top, genuinely helpful staff for a shop that size.
Foyles on Charing Cross Road has its own long history — it was famously chaotic for decades in a way that became part of its personality, and the current incarnation is considerably more navigable without having lost the sense that something unexpected is always nearby. These two are walking distance from each other. Plan accordingly.
When you want something genuinely rare
Sotheran’s, Piccadilly
Antiquarian books, prints, maps, first editions. This is the shop you go to when you know exactly what you’re looking for, or when you want to spend an hour looking at things you definitely cannot afford but very much want. Established in 1761. The staff know things. It’s not for casual browsing so much as considered looking, but if that’s the kind of afternoon you’re after, there’s nowhere better for it in London.
When you want the East London version of all this
Brick Lane Bookshop and Libreria, Shoreditch
Different neighbourhood, different energy entirely. Brick Lane Bookshop is a proper independent — community-rooted, good on fiction and poetry, the kind of shop that has strong opinions about its stock. Libreria, around the corner in Shoreditch, organises its books thematically rather than by genre or author — so you’ll find a section on dreams, or one on cities, or one on obsession — and operates a no-phones policy inside, which sounds annoying until you’re in there and realise it’s actually quite nice to just be in a room full of books without half your brain somewhere else.
When you want someone to take you seriously
London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury
The bookshop arm of the London Review of Books, which tells you more or less everything you need to know. Strong on essays, criticism, poetry, translated fiction. Excellent events. The kind of shop where you go in for one specific thing and leave having also bought three things you’d never heard of and are now very glad exist. The café next door is good for sitting with whatever you just bought.
When you want something you won’t find anywhere else
Word on the Water, Regent’s Canal
A bookshop on a barge. This is now well-known enough that it features in international travel guides, which still feels slightly surreal given that not so long ago it was just a boat on a canal near Granary Square with a lovely owner and an interesting selection and no particular fanfare. It’s earned its reputation. Go when the weather is good, browse slowly, don’t rush it.
When you want the film version of London
The Notting Hill Bookshop
Yes, that one. It’s small, it’s on a pretty street, it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be. The film wasn’t actually shot here — the production used a different shop — but this one has absorbed the mythology regardless and runs with it cheerfully. Worth a visit if you’re in the area, which you should be anyway because Notting Hill is a good neighbourhood for a bookshop crawl.
Honourable Mention: The One We Lost
Persephone Books had its shop on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury — those beautiful grey paperbacks, neglected women’s fiction, one of the most distinctive publishing projects in British literary culture. The shop is closed now, but the press still operates online and the books are still very much worth seeking out. Lamb’s Conduit Street itself is still worth the walk.
For the full literary London experience beyond the bookshops — the squares, the cemeteries, the bridge I refuse to cross — that’s [over here.]