Browse books at the new Foyles

Over the last two weeks, London's biggest bookshop closed the doors at the building it has occupied since 1929, leaving it looking forlorn and empty. However, as many readers will already know, this is not another sad story of bookshop closure, but instead a positive tale of bookshop success, with Foyles moving to the building next door, and opening a new flagship store with nearly 40,000 square feet of bookshop, four miles of shelves and four bookshop floors, plus two more for a cafe and events space.


The new shop occupies what was once the home of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, the famous art school, and the new shop - the largest bookshop to open in the country so far this century - feels more open and easy to understand than its predecessor, where sometimes identical-looking floors and a lot of books crammed into a limited space meant that it was inevitably more friendly to idle browsers than those looking for something specific.

The new shop also has a large atrium in the middle, which helps easily-confused customers like your author to understand which floor they are on, and will soon have a new larger cafe on the 5th floor to replace the much loved Ray's Jazz Cafe next door. For those who are mourning the movement from of the old shop, it is worth noting that this is the third Foyles building in Charing Cross Road, and though the 113-119 was heralded as the 'world's first purpose-built bookshop', the shop was at 135 Charing Cross Road from 1906 until 1929, and the original Foyles was in Queen's Road, Peckham.

For more, see http://www.foyles.co.uk/