“An awful lot of people had been looking forward to visiting bookshops: they play a central role in keeping people sane,” said Brett Wolstencroft, the manager at Daunt Books, on Tuesday (13 April) morning. The previous day, his shop in London’s Marylebone had opened its doors to the public for the first time in three months, and it had gone well: “Yesterday was every bit as busy as you would ordinarily have hoped for on a bright, sunshine-y spring day.”
As Covid-19 lockdown restrictions eased in England on 12 April, allowing “non-essential” retailers, and cafés and pubs with outdoor seating, to reopen for the first time since 6 January, bookshops were for many people the first destination. “All our best regulars came in within the first couple of hours and it was pretty emotional to see the space being used for browsing books again,” said Jo Heygate, manager at Pages of Hackney, east London.
Content from our partners
