Independent bookshops grow for second year after 20-year decline

After a tiny increase in 2017, figures show their ranks swelled by 15 stores last year in the face of ‘an increasingly challenging landscape’

• What are your favourite independent bookshops and why?
  

The litany of bookshops that have disappeared from the UK’s high streets over the last two decades is long and sobering: chains such as Ottakars, Books etc, Dillons and Borders, and more than 1,000 independents. But over the past two years, indies have been quietly flourishing, with official figures from the Booksellers Association revealing a growth in numbers for the second year in a row.

Before 2017, the number in the UK and Ireland had declined every year since 1995, when there were 1,894 independent bookshops. A low of just 867 shops was reached in 2016, but 2017 marked a tiny turnaround: then, the total number in the UK and Ireland increased by just one, to reach 868. At the time, the BA predicted that booksellers’ fortunes were reversing. Now, its latest membership numbers confirm it: in 2018, the number of independents rose by 15 to 883. New stores range from Category Is Books in Glasgow – the second LGBTQ-dedicated bookshop in the UK – to the gloriously named Stripey Badger Bookshop in the Yorkshire Dales, and Lost in Books in Cornwall.

Related: A good bookshop is not just about the books – at last we realise that | Sian Cain

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