Book Trade – Church House Bookshop, Westminster, London

An award winning Bookshop set at the heart of National and Church Government.

The recently refurbished Church House Bookshop, situated near Westminster Abbey in London is a delight to visit. It’s bright, light and airy with high ceilings and distinctive semi-circular metallic feature windows. The deep red armchairs are inviting and the book range is both wide and deep, reflecting a broad churchmanship whilst understandably and rightly centering on its historic Anglican market. I spied a signed copy promotion and a number of well stocked promotional tables.

Church House Bookshop is just off the main tourist drag, adjacent to the Church House conference centre in Great Smith Street and right opposite the Department of Education. The shop began life in 1936 as an Anglican library and resource centre, and then branched into bookselling as a Book Room in 1946. Mark Clifford, now of Sarum Books was a previous manager. Since 2006, the shop has been owned by Hymns Ancient and Modern and is part of the Norwich-based company that publishes the Church Times. In these uncertain days, it’s good to visit a shop with a secure and stable future, located in an important part of central London, particularly now that so many of the larger city centre Christian outlets have closed.

I met with Aude Pasquier who, amongst her company responsibilities, oversees the shop. Aude joined HA&M in 2011 from DLT and SPCK. Events are increasingly important and the team look after the Greenbelt shop and are involved in their own Bloxham ‘Festival of Faith and Literature’. The shop is the ‘public face of HA&M’ but is left very much to its own devices.

This is a destination shop for a market comprising clergy and church professionals, teachers visiting the DOE, civil servants from the nearby Ministry of Justice and a tiny, mainly elderly local community. Thursday and Friday are the busiest trading days, Thursday being publication day for the Church Times. Opening hours are often extended for the synods and conferences held next door at Church House (the legal link between the two ceased in 2006).

The shop statistics are impressive: a five member staff team with over 60 years of bookselling experience between them (Hatchards, SPCK, Wesley Owen and Mowbrays), a turnover in excess of £750k per annum, and the appealing summer 2013 refit at a cost of £70k. The challenges facing the shop are two-fold: remaining competitive on price and availability and keeping the ‘right’ range of titles in stock. Good links with their own Norwich warehouse ensure that customer orders can be turned around quickly.

Michael Addison, Sales & Marketing Director at HA&M says,

‘Whilst Church House Bookshop has a wonderful, loyal customer base – we are doing what we can to broaden this out … especially to a younger audience at events’. 

Church House is an outstanding bookshop with an evident and proud commitment to range bookselling.

This article was written in early June for publication in Together Magazine (July to August 2014).

Advertisement

Book Trade – Memorial to C S Lewis in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, London

Friday 22^nd November 2013 is the 50^th anniversary of C S Lewis’s death in 1963; a date he shares with USA President J F Kennedy. A permanent memorial to Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963); writer, scholar and ‘one of the most significant Christian apologists of the twentieth century’, was laid today in the floor of the South Transept at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The service to dedicate the memorial was uplifting and joyful, a spiritual occasion with shades of a funeral farewell. Hymns were sung which I hadn’t heard since my school days – John Bunyan’s He who would valiant be – a throwback to Lewis’s world of the 1950’s; so all the more significant then that Lewis’s books continue to sell in such volume, and with such wide appeal. The Chronicles of Narnia have sold upwards of 100m copies around the world! Mere Christianity continues as a classic.

The rather pronounced English voice of Belfast-born ‘Jack’ Lewis (taken from his wartime talks for the BBC) was broadcast in the Abbey on this bitterly cold but sunlit November day in London;

‘Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him, everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness, despair and ruin’.

C S Lewis’s last pupil read a lesson; the service was seamless and beautifully choreographed.  The Abbey was filled with a soft light suffused through the glorious stained glass and with soaring choral music which echoed off the ancient stonework. As the memorial was dedicated, there was a reading from The Last Battle:

‘Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no-one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before’.

The draw for many in this audience was the past Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and a Lewis author (The Lion’s World : SPCK) who gave a short but erudite address. On this occasion he wisely left Narnia alone, concentrating instead on Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Lord Williams of Oystermouth homed in on how Lewis deplored the misuse of language; how he saw it is used to hide from ourselves and to hide from reality.

Our questions fall away; we have nothing to say because we have too much to say.

Rowan Williams noted Lewis’s aversion to the King James Bible which he saw as getting in the way of our understanding. Instead Lewis preferred the Moffatt and J B Phillips translations of the Bible in order to best ‘hear’ the freshness of the text.

The one-hour service ended with a choral anthem based on verses written by C S Lewis and specially commissioned for today’s service. Then the long queue began as almost the entire congregation snaked around the Abbey to view the new slate memorial stone set at the base of one of the stone pillars in Poets’ Corner, engraved with Lewis’s words:

‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else’.