Where in the World: Local Bookstore

Where in the World Are You Reading is a monthly themed meme co-hosted by Trish, Kailana, and Lisa. A Linky Post will publish the first Thursday of each month, and you can submit your post (as many as you want!) any time before the last Thursday in order to be included in the monthly wrap-up post.

July’s theme is Local Bookstore. Join in anytime before July 26th to be included in the end of month wrap-up. Local bookstore can be any physical brick and mortar store–one you’ve visited on vacation or one local to you. The bookstore can be an Indie or Chain.

Waterstones : Bradford

I have mentioned my favourite local bookshop on here a few times. It is a ‘big name store’ being a Waterstones, but don’t hold that against it, as it has little to do with why I like the store. It is much more to do with the building itself.

This Waterstones bookshop is based in the 145 year old, Wool Exchange building in Bradford city-center.

As the name suggests it was originally designed and built my renowned local architects  Lockwood and Mawson, as a wool trading center, and continued as such for nearly 100 years.

When I was a kid, the building was really under-utilised, and I can only remember it being used for the odd flea market, then in the nineties the building underwent some renovations, and Waterstones moved into the main hall. (at about the same time, Dillons Booksellers moved in to a building just around the corner! You can imagine what a joy this was, when Bradford city-center didn’t have a decent bookshop previously)

It’s just a wonderful building to browse for books in, great light, beautiful surroundings, the smell of coffee wafting down from the Starbucks on the mezzanine floor above you, and quite often some really great music (I hear Kate Rusby and Seth Lakeman quite often) playing softly in the background.

The photos above were me playing about with Histogram on my iPhone, but I also took some better shots with my proper camera, and you can check them out in the gallery below. (You can also read more about the building in this Wikipedia entry.)