A good literary bookstore can transform a philistine desert into an oasis of cultural rejuvenation.
"I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare." (Ben Okri)
The "bookstore" category is the only vibrancy metric to which the TDF team have applied any form of cultural discrimination. More specifically, we have restricted our dataset to outlets that we have classified as "independent literary bookstores" (of which London can boast more than 150, dotted haphazardly across the city).
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Hover your cursor over any of the dots and it will display the name of the bookstore, its street location and its postcode.
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As for the criteria for demarcating a bookstore as an "independent literary bookstore", the methodology was not overly sophisticated. We simply excluded the following categories:​
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all airport bookstores;
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all WH Smith bookstores (not because their books lack literary merit but simply because they can't credibly claim to have any of the "bookish" feel of a true boutique or even of a medium sized chain such as Waterstones);
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all bookstores dedicated to the sale of religious texts;
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all bookstores focused on the marketing of quack remedies or philosophies (we'll spare their blushes...but it's interesting to note that there a good handful of these).
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all bookstores dedicated to narrow interest topics (e.g. cookery bookstores, purveyors of abstruse legal texts, bookstores dedicated to train-spotting aficionados, specialist retailers of treatises on gender & sexuality, etc).
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By default, those stores that survived this culling process were deemed of sufficiently broad-and-bookish calibre to merit inclusion in our list of independent literary bookstores.
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