The Guardian takes up Willesden Bookshop issue

From today's Guardian

 

The Willesden Bookshop is just one of the many independent bookshops that are struggling to survive . Photograph Graham Turner for the Guardian

 

The shelves of the Willesden Bookshop are half-empty. The independent bookseller which launched local author Zadie Smith's debut, White Teeth, and has provided a vast range of books to the diverse north-west London community it has served for 23 years, is in the throes of its closing down sale, and staff and customers are devastated.

Helen Sensi, who has worked at the shop since it opened, called the latest closure "heartbreaking". Sensi is also known as the mysterious "Helen" from Zadie Smith's recent New York Review of Books article] in which the novelist lamented the shop's closure and praised her as the woman who "gives the people of Willesden what they didn't know they wanted. Smart books, strange books, books about the country they came from, or the one that they're in."

Part of the Willesden Green Library Centre, the bookshop is being forced to close by Brent council's redevelopment plans for the area. The council believes the current centre, which also houses a museum and a library, is "not fit for purpose, and struck a deal with developer Galliford Try to knock it down and rebuild it in return for allowing Galliford to build 92 flats behind the library. Following huge local protests the plans have now been delayed subject to further consultation, but the bookshop was told its lease would end at the end of August, and it has nowhere else to go.

"It's ironic in that the whole protest has been successful in that the council has had to listen and halt its plans and realise it has to get local people on their side," said owner Steve Adams. "But sadly they haven't come to us and said 'It looks like right now this is happening, can we give you a new lease?' … We would have grabbed at the chance."

The Willesden Green shop is just one of the UK's independent booksellers struggling to survive. Figures from the Booksellers Association showed there were 1,094 independent bookshops left in the UK by the end of 2011, down from 1,159 in 2010 and 1,289 in 2009.

"We've been inundated with people saying 'Why are you closing down?'" said Sensi. "I think people will feel a tremendous sense of loss. Independent shops have had a hard time, but Steve has kept the shop going where others have fallen. He's managed to be a community service, even if the council doesn't recognise it."

Sensi said that the end of the Willesden store was "a disaster for children in terms of literacy. To see children engrossed on the floor, from tiny tots reading cloth books to older children running towards a cover they recognise, is a delight. For me, that's where it begins."

It was in another of Adams's stores, the recently closed Kilburn Bookshop, that Smith herself first started reading. "He allowed the children just to look at the books – they ate them because they were young. He just allows children to enjoy books," said the novelist's mother, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, who said she was "absolutely gutted" about the Willesden shop's closure and who is one of the 5,000 locals to have petitioned the council about the Galliford Try deal.

"It's been my local bookshop for 23 years … It's a huge loss. Willesden hasn't got a landmark, and the bookshop has brought all kinds of people here. [And] it's a community space. I don't know what we're going to have. I don't know what would be a meeting point with that space gone," she said. "It is very upsetting. I have had a tradition to take the children to the bookshop and the library, and now when the [grandchildren] arrive, we always go into the bookshop.

"I've got a beautiful video of my eldest granddaughter sitting in Steve's bookshop by the children's books, reading a novel upside down.

"[And] Zadie's first book was launched there. It was wonderful to have the launch in the bookshop owned by the person who had the shop in which she first started reading. Her voice was quivering when she read."Bailey-Smith praised the shop's range of multicultural titles, particularly for children. When her own children were born, she said, there were very few multicultural books available "that showed characters that looked like themselves. Steve had lots of Errol Lloyd, and anything else he could find, that represented children around the world, and that was lovely."

Adams is now hunting for new premises after declining the council's offer of a short-term rental in the high street, and will meanwhile keep his schools business and website, specialising in multi-cultural children's books, running from an office in a store he co-owns in Highgate.

"We would desperately like to stay in Willesden," he said. "We have listened to residents and broadened the scope of what could be in the retail space, so it could include a bookshop," said a spokesman. "We offered the bookshop a fully fitted unit on the high street as a short-term solution while a permanent unit was found, but this was turned down. We are still in contact with the owners of the Willesden Green Bookshop regarding finding alternative space."